That changed today, however, with Hurricane Odile — a Category 3 monster that slammed Cabo San Luca early Monday morning, only slightly weaker than its peak Category 4 strength. According to the National Hurricane Center, Odile tied a 1967 storm for the distinction of being the “the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the satellite era in the state of Baja California Sur.” Capital Weather Gang’s Jason Samenow adds that Odile’s “size, strength, and track is a worst case scenario for this region.”

At landfall, the storm had maximum sustained winds speeds of 125 miles per hour. It seems likely that it was the strongest storm on record to strike the posh resort of Cabo San Lucas: The aforementioned 1967 storm, Hurricane Olivia, took quite a different route across the Baja peninsula. It did not strengthen to its peak until it was already in the Gulf of California, between Baja and the Mexican mainland. Samenow quotes Brian McNoldy, an expert on tropical weather for Capital Weather Gang, who observes of Odile that “specifically in Cabo San Lucas, it was the most intense landfall.”

The result? Here’s a firsthand account from a storm chaser, Josh Morgerman, who was seeking refuge in a hotel:

[A]t maybe midnight … BOOM!!!!! The entire glass wall of the lobby EXPLODED — with glass, pieces of building, everything flying to the other end of the lobby. Like an explosion in an action movie. A hotel worker and I ducked under the reception counter — I physically grabbed his head and pushed it under the counter. Glass was everywhere — my leg gashed — blood. We crawled into the office — me, the worker, and the manager — but the ceiling started to lift up. After five minutes of debate — breathing hard like three trapped animals– we made a run for it– went running like HELL across the lobby — which is now basically just OUTSIDE — and made it to the stairwell and an interior hallway. Two nice women dressed my wound …

As the Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters points out, if there is one more Category 3 or higher hurricane this year in the Eastern Pacific, it will tie the all-time record of eight such major hurricanes in one season, set in 1992. And there’s still roughly a third of the season to go.

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of a new study suggesting that religious and nonreligious individuals are equally moral, and new research on gender discrimination in job performance evaluations, particularly by men with traditional views of gender roles. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds viaiTunes orRSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ on iTunes — you can learn more here.

With less than two months until the 2014 elections, the political falsehoods are rolling in. Consider the Colorado Senate race, between incumbent Democrat Mark Udall and his Republican challenger, Rep. Cory Gardner. Trying to brand himself as just as green as Udall (a longtime clean energy champion), Gardner recently ran an ad claiming that as a state senator in 2007, he “co-wrote the law to launch our state’s green energy industry.”

But when 9 News, Denver’s NBC affiliate, fact-checked the ad, it found the law Gardner was touting didn’t accomplish much at all to promote green initiatives. Asked for a statement, Gardner’s campaign responded, “Cory says that he co-wrote a law ‘to launch our state’s green energy industry,’ not that launched it.’ (The emphasis is Gardner’s.) In other words, the impression given by the ad is just wrong, as the Gardner campaign winkingly admits! “Folks, we honestly do not know if we have ever seen such a frank acknowledgement of purposeful deception from an American politician,” commented the local politics blog ColoradoPols. You can watch the 9 News segment here.

Gardner comes off, in this instance, as reminiscent of GOP pollster Neil Newhouse. While working for Mitt Romney in 2012, Newhouse infamously declared, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” Gardner’s cavalier response, like Newhouse’s brazen statement, raises the fear that despite a voluminous growth of fact-checking in the past half decade, there’s really nothing the media can do to keep politicians honest. But is that really true?

Not according to Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, who has focused much of his research on employing the tools of social science to figure out why fact-checking so often fails, and what can be done to make it work better. The cynical view on fact-checking is “too negative,” argues Nyhan on the latest installment of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “I think you have to think about what politics might look like without those fact-checkers, and I think it would look worse.”

Nyhan hasn’t just been studying the fact-check movement; he was there at its origins. In the early 2000s, he coauthored a site called Spinsanity.com, a nonpartisan fact-checking outlet. It was the beginning of a wave: In 2003, the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania launched FactCheck.org. But the real fact-checking movement kicked into gear in the late 2000s, with the launch of PolitiFact, by far the most widely known of these outlets, as well as the 2007 launch of the Washington Post fact-checker column, now written by Glenn Kessler.

Brendan NyhanBrendan Nyhan

As a result, in the last few years, a huge volume of claims have been given one to four Pinocchios by the Post, or declared “True,” “Pants on Fire,” or somewhere in between by PolitiFact. That includes the repeated debunking of the last half-decades’ mega-lies: birtherism, for instance, and claims about the Affordable Care Act creating “death panels.” So what does the evidence show about this endeavor?

First the good news: Overall, the fact-checkers have reinforced the idea that reality exists, and journalists are capable of discerning what it is. That may seem obvious, but it’s actually worth underscoring that we don’t live in a postmodern nightmare of subjectivity. “The fact-checkers, when they rate the same content, come to the same conclusion a very high percentage of the time,” says Nyhan. “So that’s a good indication that they are seeing the evidence and interpreting it in a consistent way.” For instance, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and the Post‘s Kessler all refuted Sarah Palin’s “death panel” claim; PolitiFact dubbed it the “lie of the year” in 2009.

That’s not to say that fact-checkers are themselves entirely unbiased. PolitiFact in particular has been repeatedly criticized for false equivalence in how it treats the left and the right. It’s just to say that they largely agree with one another, suggesting that facts are, for the most part, discernible.

The Backfire Effect

A far tougher issue, though, is whether minds change when fact-checkers make their pronouncements. On the level of individual psychology, repeated studies by Nyhan and others have shown that it is very hard to correct a misperception once it is out there in the media ether. We’ve previously reported on the so-called “backfire effect,” discovered by Nyhan and his colleague Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter. Again and again, they’ve found in experiments that trying to correct certain false claims that are highly politically charged — the claim that tax cuts increase government revenue, for instance — often just doesn’t work. Partisans can actually become stronger in their wrong beliefs upon encountering a refutation.

Consider the data, for instance, when Nyhan and Reifler attempted, in a classic study, to get partisans to change their minds about the tax cut claim (which they attributed to George W. Bush). In the experiment, participants were shown a fake newspaper article containing an actual George W. Bush quotation: “The tax relief stimulated economic vitality and growth and it has helped increase revenues to the Treasury.” In one version of the experiment, the article then contained a correction, refuting this claim; in another version it did not. It turned out that conservatives who read the correction believed Bush’s falsehood more strongly than did conservatives who never read the correction:

Backfire effect: Conservatives became more likely to believe President Bush’s claim that tax cuts increase revenue after reading a correction explaining that it isn’t true.Brendan Nyhan

And that’s just the beginning of the difficulties related to correcting errors and making the corrections stick in people’s heads. Nyhan also notes that much research suggests that negating a claim (“the Affordable Care Act doesn’t create death panels”) actually has the effect of reinforcing it in our minds (“there are death panels”). “We should be pretty cautious about how high our hopes are for changing people’s minds,” he says. “Once those myths are out there, it’s very hard to change people’s minds.”

Fact-Checking As Deterrence

Such are some of the reasons to question the power of fact-checking. So then why does Nyhan think a world with fact-checking in it is way better than one without it? The answer is that it’s not so much about changing the minds of the partisans as it is about deterring the politicians. “They’re so often the vehicle for these myths,” Nyhan says. “If they know they’ll be called out publicly, they may not reinforce or disseminate these myths in the first place.”

So what about fact-checking as deterrence? Does it work? After all, no politician wants the campaign narrative to revolve around allegations that he or she is a liar, or detached from reality.

Mother Jones‘ David Corn has made the case that in the 2012 election, politicians like Mitt Romney just weren’t deterred. And it may well be that on the national level, and especially on the presidential level, politicians get fact-checked so often, and fact-checkers try so hard to spread around the opprobrium, that ultimately it’s a wash.

However, on the local level, this stuff seems to really matter. Nyhan and Reifler provided data to support this idea in a 2013 New America Foundation study. During the 2012 election cycle, they sent letters to 392 state legislators who had PolitiFact affiliates in their states. The letters simply noted that the politicians’ statements might be fact-checked, and that there were reputational risks associated with getting a poor rating. “We sent them a lot of letters,” Nyhan explains. “Some of them became very sick of hearing from us in the mail, as we sent them letter after letter, reminding them just what a significant threat fact-checking could be to them.” Two other groups of legislators, of similar size, received either no letters or a “placebo” letter saying the authors were studying how accurate politicians are, but didn’t bring up reputational risks or fact-checking.

The study found that the warning letters had a statistically significant effect: Legislators who received them were less likely to have their accuracy questioned by PolitiFact, or by other news sources found in a Lexis-Nexis search. Of course, it was also extremely unlikely for any legislator to be fact-checked at all. Thus, the risk declined from just under 3 percent down to 1 percent:

To Nyhan, this suggests that fact-checking can serve as a deterrent, and can be a particularly big deal in local as opposed to national races — which means it matters in 2014. Indeed, in one case, fact-checking already appears to have significantly damaged a campaign. In Alaska, incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Begich ran an ad suggesting his opponent, former state Attorney General Dan Sullivan, had not been tough enough on sex offenders, going on to state that one of them got out of prison early and went on to commit a horrific crime — a sexual assault and double murder. But PolitiFact rated the ad’s claims “pants on fire,” finding that Sullivan was not responsible for the suspect’s release. Begich’s campaign soon pulled it off the air.

In other words, the ad itself became an issue, and Begich has had to contend with a major backlash, as well as the black eye of having to pull an ad.

To Nyhan, that’s the whole point. Backfires and biases notwithstanding, there remains the potential for a prominent factual correction to cause a media furor, and, in some case, to damage a politician’s reputation. Partisans may stick with their candidate, but they’ll be sticking with a candidate who has been forced to play defense.

So facts work — kind of. Sometimes. Even if politicians try to avoid them.

“I think fact-checking has caused big important changes in how we cover the news now,” Nyhan says, “and it’s gotten especially the younger generation of reporters much more interested in going beyond that ‘he-said, she-said’ reporting.”

Filed under: Climate & Energy, Politics]]>http://grist.org/politics/this-man-wrote-hundreds-of-letters-warning-politicians-not-to-lie-it-worked/feed/0politician liarBrendan NyhanBackfire effect: Conservatives became more likely to believe President Bush's claim that tax cuts increase revenue after reading a correction explaining that it isn't true.From Nyhan and Reifler, "The Effects of Fact-Checking Threat: Results from a field experiment in the states," New American Foundation Research Paper, 2013Climate DeskStop pretending that liberals are just as anti-science as conservativeshttp://grist.org/climate-energy/stop-pretending-that-liberals-are-just-as-anti-science-as-conservatives/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_chrismooney
http://grist.org/climate-energy/stop-pretending-that-liberals-are-just-as-anti-science-as-conservatives/#commentsFri, 12 Sep 2014 11:30:25 +0000http://grist.org/?p=257195]]>

So who’s worse when it comes to ignoring and denying science, the political left or the political right?

For a long time, those wishing to claim that both sides are equally bad — we’re all biased, just in different directions — have relied upon two key issues in making their case: vaccines and genetically modified foods, or GMOs. The suggestion is that these are basically the liberal equivalent of evolution denial or global-warming denial. Skeptic magazine founding publisher Michael Shermer, for instance, prominently cited resistance to GMOs in a Scientific American article last year entitled “The Liberals’ War on Science.” As for vaccines? In a recent segment entitled “An Outbreak of Liberal Idiocy,” no less than The Daily Show suggested that vaccine denial is a left-wing scourge.

There’s just one problem: Commentators seem to just assume, without evidence, that anti-science beliefs on these two issues are a predominantly liberal phenomenon. But that assumption hasn’t been subjected to nearly enough scrutiny, especially in light of high profile vaccine-skeptic conservatives like Donald Trump and Michele Bachmann. The GMO issue is also politically suspicious: It is inherently conservative, in the purest sense of the word, to resist technological changes to the nature of food production (or anything else, for that matter).

And sure enough, the evidence just doesn’t support the idea that vaccine denial is some special left-wing fixation — and it’s barely any kinder to received wisdom on the issue of GMOs. I will demonstrate as much below, but first, let’s remember why this matters.

It is very clear that there are certain major issues where there is only one correct scientific answer, and political conservatives are much more likely to deny that answer than are liberals or moderates. Conservatives have also been shown to trust scientists less than liberals or moderates do. So no wonder they also reject their most important (if sometimes inconvenient) conclusions more often.

Here are the top two hits (but by no means the only examples) of conservative science denial, followed by some hard data on public attitudes about vaccines and GMOs:

Climate change: Here, the undeniable reality is that humans are causing global warming, and polls have repeatedly shown that it is political conservatives and Republicans who deny this fact about the world. According to recent data from the Yale and George Mason projects on climate change communication, for instance, 75 percent of liberal Democrats, but only 22 percent of conservative Republicans, accept the reality that humans are causing climate change — more than a 50-point difference! Myriad other polls and studies have found something similar.

Evolution: Here, the undeniable reality is that humans share a common ancestry with the rest of life on Earth, and that the diversity of life that we witness all around us is the result of an evolutionary process. And here again, those on the right deny this reality much more than do those on the left (although notably, the gap is not as wide as it is on the climate issue). According to a late 2013 Pew study, 67 percent of Democrats, but only 43 percent of Republicans, agree that “humans and other living things have evolved over time.” That’s a 24-point difference. Indeed, based on these data, 48 percent of Republicans (compared to just 27 percent of Democrats) think “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time,” meaning that the GOP today is very nearly a majority creationist party.

That’s a seriously big deal, given that Young Earth Creationism embraces many other kinds of science denial besides the mere rejection of evolution. Rejection of the age of Earth, for instance, and accordingly, of large swaths of physics and geology. It is a deeply anti-science ideology that extends far beyond one’s views about any particular scientific issue.

So it is very natural to ask whether there is really anything parallel to this rejectionism on the modern American left, and to try to adduce examples. However, the vaccine and GMO examples don’t cut it. To show as much, let’s examine them in turn.

Vaccines: Here, the undeniable reality is that childhood vaccines are safe and do not cause autism. So do liberals deny this fact more frequently than conservatives?

Recent research suggests the answer to that question is “no.” In a 2013 paper published in PLOS One, for instance, Stephan Lewandowsky and his colleagues surveyed a representative sample of 1001 Americans about their ideological beliefs and their views on contentious science topics. That included vaccines, where they used a five-item questionnaire to assess people’s views, including statements like “I believe that vaccines are a safe and reliable way to help avert the spread of preventable diseases” and “I believe that vaccines have negative side effects that outweigh the benefits of vaccination for children.”

The study did not find that people on the left were more likely to oppose or distrust vaccines. Rather, it found a highly nuanced result. The researchers examined two related but distinct contributors to right-wing ideology: self-identification as a political conservative and support for the free market. It found that while the former was related to somewhat more vaccine support, the latter was related to somewhat more vaccine opposition. According to Lewandowsky, the two opposing forces “virtually cancel overall.”

Other studies have found similar results. In a 2009 paper, Yale’s Dan Kahan and his colleagues found that the conservative ideological values of “hierarchy” and “individualism” were both linked to greater opposition to the HPV vaccine in particular. In a paper from earlier this year, meanwhile, Kahan found that the idea of a link between the political left and the belief that vaccines in general are dangerous “lacks any factual basis.” In fact, if anything, he found a small increase in belief in vaccine risks as one moved to the right of the political spectrum.

If you’d prefer to examine the patterns of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks, meanwhile, those also seem politically diverse. We are having a horrible year for measles, for instance, with 18 outbreaks and 592 cases, more than double the total in any previous year since 2001. And the 21 states that have seen cases and outbreaks run the political gamut; they include California and Massachusetts, but also Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, and Ohio (home to a large outbreak in the Amish community, a group of people that can hardly be called “liberal”). Last year, meanwhile, there was a measles outbreak clustered around a Texas megachurch.

When it comes to the right and vaccines, there’s also evidence like this:

I am being proven right about massive vaccinations—the doctors lied. Save our children & their future.

So in sum, the evidence that vaccine opposition is somehow specially tied to left-wing beliefs is just lacking. Rather, the largest factor here, according to Lewandowsky’s research, is conspiratorial beliefs, which are hard to categorize as either left wing or right wing in nature.

Genetically modified foods: Now let’s move on to the GMO issue. Here, it is less obvious what a clear-cut anti-science belief would actually be, but perhaps the most obvious case is the belief that genetically modified foods are harmful if consumed by humans. This position has been rejected by the board of American Association for the Advancement of Science, which assures us that “crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe.” So do liberals disproportionately believe wrong things about genetically modified foods?

Lewandowsky’s paper also examined GM beliefs, once again using a five-point scale that included statements like “I believe that genetically engineered foods have already damaged the environment” and “Genetic modification of foods is a safe and reliable technology.” And the researchers found that “opposition to GM foods was not associated with worldview constructs.”

“This result is striking,” the researchers went on to say, “in light of reports in the media that have linked opposition to GM foods with the political Left.”

Lewandowsky et al. aren’t the only ones. For instance, an independent analysis of data from the General Social Survey by the Discover magazine blogger Razib Khan also found no real left-right difference in views about GMOs.

Still, given just how striking these results are, and how contrary to what people assume, I sought to verify them by examining yet another poll. So with much help from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut, which supplied an abundance of data, I looked into the details behind a January 2013 CBS News poll that asked a variety of questions about GMOs using a representative national sample of 1,052 Americans.

For the most part, the results support Lewandowsky and Khan. GMO concern appears largely spread across the spectrum in this poll, and while it is somewhat stronger among Democrats (and, as we’ll see, especially strong on the far left), it is also very strong among Republicans and independents. For instance, the poll found that all three groups overwhelmingly support the labeling of foods containing GM ingredients (an idea the American Association for the Advancement of Science rejects): 90 percent of Republicans, 94 percent of Democrats, and 95 percent of independents were in favor.

Getting closer to a purely scientific issue, respondents were asked, “How concerned are you about genetically modified or genetically engineered food — Very concerned, somewhat concerned, not too concerned or not at all concerned?” Seventy-one percent of Republicans, 80 percent of Democrats, and 75 percent of independents said they were either “very” or “somewhat” concerned.

What’s more, those who did profess this level of concern then went on to answer a second question, in which they were asked more precisely what they were worried about. Twenty-five percent of concerned Republicans, 29 percent of concerned Democrats, and 25 percent of concerned independents answered “not safe to eat.” Meanwhile, 33 percent of concerned Republicans, 39 percent of concerned Democrats, and 37 percent of concerned independents answered “cause health problems.” (These are the clear-cut science deniers.)

So while there might be slightly more concern about GM foods among Democrats, overall concern is broad and appears substantially non-ideological in nature — which makes sense if you think about the concerns as being motivated by people’s fears of consuming something that is supposedly icky or unnatural. Indeed, when asked in another survey question whether they would eat “genetically modified or genetically engineered fish,” 74 percent of Republicans, 73 percent of Democrats, and 71 percent of independents said “no.”

However, there is one important qualification. Although Democrats, Republicans, and independents do not look all that different on GMOs, it turns out that if you split Democrats and Republicans up into different ideological groups, you can discern more left-right differentiation on the issue (even as worries remain spread across the spectrum). The CBS News poll did just that. In addition to their party affiliation, people were also asked whether they self-identified as “very liberal,” “somewhat liberal,” “moderate,” “somewhat conservative,” and “very conservative.” When you break it down this way, 92 percent of “very liberal” respondents were either “somewhat” or “very” concerned about GMOs, compared with only 71 percent of “very conservative” respondents. (Those who were “somewhat liberal,” “moderate,” and “somewhat conservative” look pretty similar; their percentages are 79, 75, and 74, respectively.)

However, it is important to note that people who are “very liberal” are also the smallest ideological group in the survey by far (6 percent). There were more than twice as many “very conservative” respondents (13 percent), and since the survey was nationally representative, we should expect something similar for the United States as a whole.

Such, then, are the data. They do not support for the idea that vaccine denial is a special left-wing cause. As for GMOs, while resistance may be strongest on the far left, worries on this issue are quite prominent across the spectrum as well.

In neither case are these beliefs a mirror image, on the left, of climate change or evolution denial. And as for other issues that are sometimes cited as examples of left-wing science denial, such as fracking and nuclear power? Those examples are problematic, too. (See here for my thinking on these subjects.)

In the end, maybe the best way to think about the politics of science denial is this: There are two major, separate types of science denial out there. One is clearly right-wing and is driven by conservative activists, think tanks, media outlets like Fox News, and politicians. It is widely adhered to in the conservative movement, and it is highly politically relevant because conservatives (and Republicans) take their views on these issues as motivation to try to affect policy. This describes the situation on climate change, and on the teaching of evolution (and numerous other topics, like contraception and the relationship between abortion and health).

This type of science denial, institutionalized within a major party and its activist base, has little parallel on the modern American left or within the Democratic Party. However, there’s another kind of science denial, which may have many important consequences but is not driven by any one party. Its various fixations may at times appear more left wing, but are found across the political spectrum. Denialism about vaccines and GMOs fits more neatly into this latter category.

That’s not to exonerate any kind of science denial. Nor is it to deny that there are liberals or leftists out there who hold unscientific beliefs — the polls above clearly capture such people. Nonetheless, it is to say that modern conservative science denial remains a unique phenomenon.

So why, then, do people so readily assume that vaccine and GMO denial are fundamentally left-wing causes? I suspect because those of us who live in liberal, largely bicoastal cities meet vastly more liberals than conservatives; and thus, we are far more likely to actually encounter liberal or left-wing people who hold these beliefs.

However, unlike pollsters, we aren’t sampling the whole country in a statistically reliable way through our experiences. Science, though, is all about putting aside beliefs and anecdotes in the face of data.

Long before modern times, human beings caused great extinctions of charismatic animals, including many species of birds. From the gigantic Moas of New Zealand (the Polynesians killed them off in about 100 years after arriving), to the Dodo and Passenger Pigeon, we made nature poorer, throwing away biological diversity and unique products of evolution that can never be replaced.

But it looks like all of that may have been a meager preview to the consequences of climate change for the diversity of birds in our modern world. Such is the upshot of a vast new study by the Audubon Society’s scientists, which overall finds that by the end of the century, more than half of all North American bird species will be “threatened” by climate change. (The study did not examine the nearly 10,000 other bird species around the world, but there’s no reason to think the punchline for them would be very different.)

There are currently 588 North American bird species, and the Audubon study projected that out of those, 314 will lose “more than 50 percent of their current climatic range by 2080,” and another 126 — the “climate endangered” species — will lose that much by as soon as 2050. Losing habitat is, of course, not the same as extinction. Some of these species enjoy legal protections already, and some live on other continents, too. And some will find new habitats. But clearly, the loss of habitat is a major threat to a species.

To understand the pitched fight over this question, you first need to realize that for many years, we’ve been burning huge volumes of coal to get electricity — and coal produces a ton of carbon dioxide, the chief gas behind global warming. Natural gas, by contrast, produces half as much carbon dioxide when it burns, and thus, the fracking boom has been credited with a decline in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. So far so good, right?

Umm, maybe. Recently on our Inquiring Minds podcast, we heard from Anthony Ingraffea, a professor of engineering at Cornell University, who contends that it just isn’t that simple. Methane (the main component of natural gas) is also a hard-hitting greenhouse gas, if it somehow finds its way into the atmosphere. And Ingraffea argued that because of high leakage rates of methane from shale gas development, that’s exactly what’s happening. The trouble is that methane has a much greater “global warming potential” than carbon dioxide, meaning that it has a greater “radiative forcing” effect on the climate over a given time period (and especially over shorter time periods). In other words, according to Ingraffea, the CO2 savings from burning natural gas instead of coal is being canceled out by all the methane that leaks into the atmosphere when we’re extracting and transporting that gas. (Escaped methane from natural gas drilling complements other preexisting sources, such as the belching of cows.)

But not every scientist agrees with Ingraffea’s methane-centered argument. In particular, Raymond Pierrehumbert, a geoscientist at the University of Chicago, has prominently argued that carbon dioxide “is in a class by itself” among greenhouse warming pollutants, because unlike methane, its impacts occur over such a dramatic timescale that they are “essentially irreversible.” That’s because of carbon dioxide’s incredibly long-term effect on the climate: Given a large pulse of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, much of it will still be there 10,000 years later. By contrast, even though methane is much more potent than carbon dioxide over a short timeframe, its atmospheric lifetime is only about 12 years.

Applied to the debate over natural gas, that could mean that seeing gas displace coal is a good thing in spite of any concerns about methane leaks.

To hear this counterpoint, we invited Pierrehumbert on Inquiring Minds as well. “You can afford to actually have a little bit of extra warming due to methane if you’re using its a bridge fuel, because the benefit you get from reducing the carbon dioxide emissions stays with you forever, whereas the harm done by methane goes away more or less as soon as you stop using it,” he explained on the show. You can listen to the interview — which is part of a larger show — below, beginning at about 4:40 (or you can leap to it by clicking here):

Pierrehumbert’s arguments are based on a recent paper that he published in the Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences, extensively comparing carbon dioxide with more short-lived climate pollutants, like methane, black carbon, and ozone. The paper basically states that the metric everybody has been using to compare carbon dioxide with methane, the “global warming potential” described by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is deeply misleading.

The IPCC, in its 2013 report, calls global warming potential the “default metric” for comparing the consequences, over a fixed period of time, of emitting the same volume of two different greenhouse gases. And according to the IPCC, using this approach, methane has 84 times the atmospheric effect that an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide does over a period of 20 years. But, it’s crucial to remember that that’s over 20 years; at the end of the period, the carbon dioxide will still be around and the methane won’t. The metric, writes Humbert, is “completely insensitive” to any damages due to global warming that occur beyond a particular time window, “no matter how catastrophic they may be.” Elsewhere, he calls the approach “crude.”

To see why, consider this figure from Pierrehumbert’s paper, comparing the steady emission, over 200 years, of two hypothetical greenhouse gases (the solid blue and red lines). One gas lasts in the atmosphere for 1,000 years, and one that lasts only 10 years. Each has the same “global warming potential” at 100 years, but notice how the short-lived gas’ warming effect vanishes almost as soon as the emissions of it end:

Comparison of two greenhouse gases that have the same “global warming potential” over 100 years but very different lifetimes.

The gases in the figure aren’t carbon dioxide and methane, but you get the point. The upshot, Pierrehumbert argues, is that it is almost always a good idea to cut CO2 emissions — even if doing so results in a temporary increase of methane emissions from leaky fracked wells. As he writes:

… there is little to be gained from early mitigation of the short-lived gas [methane]. In contrast, any delay in mitigation of the long-lived gas ratchets up the warming irreversibly … the situation is rather like saving money for one’s retirement — the earlier one begins saving, the more one’s savings grow by the time of retirement, so the earlier one starts, the easier it is to achieve the goal of a prosperous retirement. Methane mitigation is like trying to stockpile bananas to eat during retirement. Given the short lifetime of bananas, it makes little sense to begin saving them until your retirement date is quite near.

And that, in turn, implies that any displacing of coal with natural gas is a good thing for the climate. It’s just less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, plain and simple.

Ingraffea disagrees. By email, he commented that Pierrehumbert “is correct that the long-term risk to climate is from CO2, but he is willing to accept the almost certain short-term consequences which can only be ameliorated by reductions in methane and black carbon.”

But interestingly, there is one major commonality between Ingraffea’s point of view and that of Pierrehumbert. Namely, both emphasize the importance of getting beyond natural gas, and transitioning to 100 percent clean energy.

Here’s the logic: Because carbon dioxide is so bad for the climate, the fact that natural gas burning does produce some of it (even if not as much as coal) means that if cheap natural gas discourages the use of carbon-free sources like nuclear, solar, or wind energy, then that’s also a huge climate negative. So just as natural gas is not nearly as bad as coal from a carbon perspective, it is also not nearly as good as renewable energy. And that, in turn, means that while natural gas can play a transitional role toward a clean energy future, that role has to be relatively brief.

“It’s useful as a bridge fuel,” says Pierrehumbert, “but if using it as a bridge fuel just drives out renewables and other carbon-free sources of energy, it’s really a bridge to nowhere.”

Filed under: Business & Technology, Climate & Energy]]>http://grist.org/climate-energy/why-coal-is-still-worse-than-fracking-and-cow-burps/feed/0Marcellus_Shale_Gas_Drilling_Tower_1Comparison of two greenhouse gases that have the same "global warming potential" over 100 years but very different lifetimes.Climate DeskThere have been 5 — yes, 5! — monster hurricanes in the eastern Pacific this yearhttp://grist.org/climate-energy/there-have-been-5-yes-5-monster-hurricanes-in-the-eastern-pacific-this-year/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_chrismooney
http://grist.org/climate-energy/there-have-been-5-yes-5-monster-hurricanes-in-the-eastern-pacific-this-year/#commentsMon, 25 Aug 2014 18:47:41 +0000http://grist.org/?p=254930]]>

Right now, swirling south of the Baja California peninsula, is a monster hurricane named Marie. Currently a Category 4 storm with 145 mile per hour maximum sustained winds, yesterday the storm was a full fledged Category 5, with 160 mile per hour winds. That makes Marie the first Category 5 in the Eastern Pacific hurricane basin so far this year — but there have been at least three other Category 4 storms so far, and one Category 3 to boot.

By any measure, these numbers are pretty striking.

According to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, the average Eastern Pacific hurricane season runs from May 15 through the end of November, and sees 15.4 total named storms, including 8.4 hurricanes, and 3.9 major hurricanes (Category 3 and greater). This year, by contrast, has already seen 13 storms, including eight hurricanes, and five major hurricanes! And there are still fully three months to go.

In fact, for 2014, the Climate Prediction Center forecast three to six major hurricanes in the East Pacific. We’re already there, but we’re only halfway through the season! Just for comparison, in the jaw-dropping 2005 Atlantic hurricane season — the season featuring Katrina, Rita, and Wilma — there were a total of seven major hurricanes.

Moreover, all this activity has been accompanied by numerous hurricane records. Back in May, Category 4 Hurricane Amanda was the strongest May storm ever seen in the basin. And just weeks later, Category 4 Hurricane Cristina set another new record, becoming the “earliest 2nd major hurricane formation” in the basin.

Now, the National Weather Service office in San Diego adds yet another record for Marie:

Note, though, that this record would appear to include Category 4 Hurricane Genevieve, which seems questionable. Genevieve was a truly rare storm that started in the Eastern Pacific as a tropical storm, and then tracked all the way across the Pacific from east to west, only attaining Category 4 strength in the Central Pacific region west of Hawaii, before then crossing the international dateline and becoming classified as a typhoon.

But with or without Genevieve, we’re still talking about a ton of strong hurricane activity. So what’s going on here? Note that even as the Eastern Pacific has been gangbusters, the Atlantic basin, where hurricanes tend to threaten the United States, has been pretty quiet. That’s no coincidence, explains Weather Underground blogger Jeff Masters by email:

… hurricane activity in the Epac [East Pacific] and the Atlantic are usually anti-correlated — when one is very active, the other is usually quiet. This occurs because when sinking air occurs over one ocean basin, there must be compensating rising air somewhere — typically over the neighboring ocean basin. Large-scale rising air helps encourage thunderstorm updrafts and thus tropical storm formation. Since ocean temperatures are much warmer than average over the Epac and near average over the Atlantic, the atmosphere over the Epac has tended to have more rising air this season than the Atlantic. Warm waters heat the air above it and make the air more buoyant, causing rising motion.

Right now, there are two major questions: Just how many more records will the 2014 Northeast Pacific Hurricane season set? And will one of those be a new record strongest hurricane ever recorded in the basin?

The current strongest storm, recorded in 1997, was Category 5 Hurricane Linda, which had maximum sustained winds of 184 miles per hour and a minimum central pressure of 902 millibars.

As for Marie: While the storm is far out at sea and unlikely to directly threaten any major land areas, it is kicking up huge waves that may be felt as far away as Los Angeles. Eastern Pacific hurricanes occasionally strike Mexico, and on rare occasions travel west far enough to menace the Hawaiian islands.

Like the excellent medical analogy (which compares ignoring global warming to ignoring the risk of smoking; or not listening to your doctor when you’re told to eat healthier and exercise), this image makes perfectly clear just how irresponsible it is to ignore the overwhelming consensus of experts.

The message also relies on the highly influential “97 percent” study, which found that of scientific papers taking a position on global warming, 97 percent agreed that humans are causing it. There is still some scholarly debate over whether this message is the best one to use to convince those who are in doubt about climate change.

But there’s no doubt whatsoever that the message can be viral. Not only does this WWF-UK tweet show that; President Obama himself tweeted out the original “97 percent” study.

On the political right, it’s pretty popular these days to claim that the left exaggerates scientific worries about hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” In a recent National Review article, for instance, a Hoover Institution researcher complains that 53 percent of Democrats in California support a fracking ban “despite the existence of little if any credible scientific evidence of fracking’s feared harms and overwhelming scientific evidence of its environmental benefits, including substantial reductions in both local and global pollutants.”

Three or four years ago, a statement like that may have seemed defensible. The chief environmental concern about fracking at that time involved the contamination of drinking water through the fracking process—blasting water, sand, and chemicals underground in vast quantities and at extreme pressures to force open shale layers deep beneath the Earth, and release natural gas. But the science was still pretty ambiguous, and a great deal turned on how “fracking” was defined. The entire mega-process of “unconventional” gas drilling had clearly caused instances of groundwater contamination, due to spills and leaks from improperly cased wells. But technically, “fracking” only refers to the water and chemical blast, not the drilling, the disposal of waste, or the huge industrial operations that accompany it all.

How things have changed. Nowadays, explains Cornell University engineering professor Anthony Ingraffea on the latest installment of the Inquiring Minds podcast (stream above), the scientific argument against fracking and unconventional gas drilling is more extensive. It involves not simply groundwater contamination, but also at least two other major problems: earthquake generation and the accidental emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Anthony Ingraffea

On the show, Ingraffea laid out the science on these issues—and it is certainly not something a reasonable person can ignore. Take earthquakes, for instance. According to Ingraffea, “there is now, in my opinion, scientific consensus that human-induced seismicity does occur” as a result of a particular aspect of unconventional gas drilling (namely, disposing of chemically laden “flowback water” in underground wastewater injection wells).

Ingraffea isn’t the likeliest scientific foe of fracking. His past research has been funded by corporations and industry interests including Schlumberger, the Gas Research Institute, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. His original doctoral work, in the 1970s, involved the study of “rock fracture mechanics”—in other words, how cracks in rock form and propagate, a body of knowledge that is crucial to extractive industries like oil and gas. “I spent 20, 25 years working with the oil and gas industry … helping them to figure out how best to get oil and gas out of rock,” Ingraffea explains.

But he has since become an outspoken critic of unconventional gas development. He recently appeared in the HBO film Gasland II, and was recognized in 2011 by Time (alongside his Cornell colleague Robert Howarth and actor Mark Ruffalo) for his work highlighting the environmental risks of shale gas development.

So what happened? In a word: science. On Inquiring Minds, Ingraffea laid out the developing science on earthquakes and methane emissions as they relate to unconventional gas development—and even if you don’t fully agree with everything he said, you still will find it unnerving. Let’s take these topics in turn:

Fracking and earthquakes. Somewhat surprisingly, the earthquake issue may actually be the least contentious scientific topic in the fracking debate. As Mother Jones has extensively reported, it now seems clear that wastewater injection—the underground storing of the chemical-laced water that comes back out of wells after fracking—can contribute to seismic activity. In fact, in a study published just last month in Science, researchers suggest that a dramatic increase in recent seismic activity in Oklahoma—including a 5.7 magnitude earthquake in 2011—is partly linked to the proliferation of wastewater disposal wells.

Granted, it may seem hard to understand (at least if you’re a non-geologist) how underground disposal wells can cause an earthquake. Let Ingraffea explain: “We’ve mobilized pre-existing, stable faults,” he says. Underground water from waste disposal “lubricates those faults and changes the pressure on them.” Naturally, the waste injection wells at issue are the ones that are closest to faults. Here’s a visualization — click to see it in action:

Illustration: Leanne Kroll. Animation: Brett Brownell.

As for the fracking process itself? That, too, can cause earthquakes, Ingraffea says, although earthquakes related to fracking (as opposed to injection wells) have been smaller (“so far,” as Ingraffea puts it). When you think about what we’re doing to the Earth, maybe that’s not so surprising. Fracking water, after all, is blasted underground at “pressures approaching what you would get if you put, say, 10 SUVs on your fingertip,” says Ingraffea.

Fracking and fugitive methane emissions. Perhaps we can manage the earthquake issue. Certainly, it would help to stop injecting wastewater near faults. “That would be a design objective, yes,” deadpans Ingraffea. (Such injection happens, he contends, because of a lack of EPA regulation.)

But there’s a potentially even graver issue—fugitive methane emissions from shale gas operations. This is the topic on which Ingraffea made his name in the fracking debate, and it’s probably the most momentous one of all.

In 2011, Ingraffea and two other Cornell researchers published a highly discussed scientific study in the journal Climatic Change, arguing that between 3.6 and 7.9 percent of methane gas from shale drilling operations actually escapes into the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming. If true, then considering the unique atmospheric potency of methane—“methane is about 80 to 90 times … more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide” over a two-to-three-decade time period, says Ingraffea—the implications could be dramatic. Natural gas could swing from being a net climate benefit (because it burns cleaner than oil or coal) to a climate harm, because of all the escaping methane.

Granted, it all depends on the leak rate from natural gas operations, across all the myriad stages of the process, from the initial release of the gas from the earth all the way through to its transportation. And that’s where the debate lies. “Every single measurement has concluded that the percentage of methane leaking into the atmosphere from oil and gas operations is far greater than two and a half percent,” says Ingraffea. “I think the best estimate right now is somewhere around 5 percent”—an amount, he says, that would be more than big enough to doom the idea of natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to a clean energy future.

Ingraffea isn’t the only researcher suggesting that methane leakage is troublingly high. In a 2013 study published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers from both U.S. universities and national labs found that the EPA is currently underestimating methane emissions from the energy industry (including both conventional and shale gas drilling). However, in another paper in Science earlier this year (covered here by Mother Jones), researchers again faulted EPA’s methane measurements, but nonetheless concluded that natural gas can still contribute to a cleaner future if methane emissions are policed adequately. (The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reached a similar conclusion.)

The bottom line? It is certainly not the case that every expert agrees with Ingraffea. For instance, both publicly and in print, Ingraffea has regularly debated Terry Engelder, a professor of geosciences at Penn State University, who argues that the benefits of shale gas development still outweigh the risks.

Engelder certainly doesn’t deny the problem of fugitive methane emissions. Rather, his view is that “by fixing leaks, green completions and what not, that can take care of the methane leaking into the atmosphere.” (“Green completions” refers to a new EPA rule that will require natural gas operators to capture volatile organic compounds on site rather than allowing them to escape to the atmosphere—a process, the EPA says, that would also “significantly reduce” methane emissions.)

But Ingraffea counters that that’s not enough. The new regulation, he says, only covers “one part of the whole supply train for natural gas, and it only applies to new gas wells, not the old ones.” Plus, it only applies to gas wells, not oil wells that also release methane.

With mounting scientific evidence behind him, then, Ingraffea makes a pretty strong case today that natural gas is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The methane issue may not be settled fully, but it is undoubtedly grave—and certainly not something that we can afford to be wrong about. To still support President Obama’s “all of the above” approach to energy (which favors renewables, but also natural gas), you have to assume we can mitigate the methane leakage problem somehow. And you shouldn’t assume that without first listening, hard, to Ingraffea’s warning. As he concludes the Inquiring Minds interview:

For those who say we can regulate our way around this, just give us time and we’ll fix the problems—I’m sorry. We’ve had 100 years of commercial oil and gas development at very large quantities, around the world. Time is over. We’ve damaged the atmosphere too much, and it would take too long, it would take decades and billions of dollars, to begin to fix the problems that we know have existed for decades. And by then, it will be too late.

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of the science on racial prejudice and guns, and, in the wake of the suicide of the beloved actor Robin Williams, the science of depression.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ on iTunes — you can learn more here.

It’s one of those facts that sweeps you back into an alien, almost unrecognizable era. On July 9, 1970, Republican President Richard Nixon announced to Congress his plans to create the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By the end of that year, bothagencies were a reality. Nowadays, among their other tasks, they either monitor or seek to mitigate the problem of global warming — actions that make today’s Republicans, Nixon’s heirs, completely livid.

To give one example of how anti-environment the right today is, just consider this ThinkProgress analysis, finding that “over 58 percent” of congressional Republicans refuse to accept the science of climate change.

So what happened to the GOP, from the time of Nixon to the present, to turn an environmental leader into an environmental retrograde? According to a new study in the journal Social Science Research, the key change actually began around the year 1991 — when the Soviet Union fell. “The conservative movement replaced the ‘Red Scare’ with a new ‘Green Scare’ and became increasingly hostile to environmental protection at that time,” argues sociologist Aaron McCright of Michigan State University and two colleagues.

So is that causal explanation right? Before getting to that question, let’s examine the study itself.

For starters, it is pretty much undebatable that Americans today are polarized over environmental issues. In a figure in their paper, McCright and his colleagues visualize this polarization by charting the average League of Conservation Voters environmental scores for congressional Democrats and Republicans from 1970 through 2013:

This figure suggests that the key left-right break point on the environment occurred sometime in the early 1990s. So does the analysis at the center of the new paper: a look at how Americans belonging to different political parties have answered the same General Social Survey question about the environment going back to the year 1974. In that year and at regular intervals ever since, the GSS has asked the following question:

We are faced with many problems in this country, none of which can be solved easily or inexpensively. I’m going to name some of these problems, and for each one I’d like you to tell me whether you think we’re spending too much money on it, too little money, or about the right amount.

One of the items then listed is “the environment” or “improving and protecting the environment.” Here’s how many Americans responded to that question over time by saying that we’re spending “too little” on environmental protection, separated by political party membership:

Once again, the key break appears to happen in the early 1990s. (Note: You might think that this just reflects a distaste on the right for government spending in general. But using more GSS data, the authors looked at support for government spending on other issues — like space exploration and foreign aid — and controlled for this general support for spending in their analysis.)

So what happened in the early 1990s? Well, for one thing, Bill Clinton was elected, flanked by a vice president, Al Gore, who had just published a book called Earth in the Balance. That made environmental issues salient in a very political way.

And then, there was the once super-intense fight over habitat protections for the northern spotted owl. Remember that?

The authors, for their part, cite the “rise of global environmentalism with the 1992 Rio Earth Summit,” which, they say, “generated a heightened level of anti-environmental activity by the conservative movement and congressional Republicans.” Here, they rely to a significant part on another 2008 paper, noting how the conservative think tank movement mobilized to oppose environmental protections in the early 1990s. The upshot is that as environmentalism became an increasingly global movement, many conservatives tarred it with the label “socialism.” “Rio reflected a heightened sense of urgency for environmental protection that was seen as a threat by conservative elites, stimulating them to replace anti-communism with anti-environmentalism,” that study observed.

But this is not the only possible explanation for the trends noted above. There has been a great deal of research on why American politics have become so polarized (on all issues, not just environmental ones), and theories to explain the trend abound. For instance, one major factor is clearly “party sorting” — the idea that conservatives have moved more into the GOP over time, even as liberals have, at least to some extent, coalesced in the Democratic Party. So, the Republicans answering a General Social Survey question about the environment in 1996 or so simply were not the same bunch of people who were answering it in 1974.

One intriguing related hypothesis posits that the right wing has become more unwilling to compromise in general because it has become more psychologically authoritarian – closed-minded, prone to black-and-white thinking. That’s not a pattern that would uniquely affect environmental issues, though. If anything, it would be felt most strongly on the topics that authoritarians most care about: crime, national defense, religion in public life, and matters of that ilk.

Whatever the cause, the consequence is clear: We can’t get anything done in a bipartisan way on the environment any longer. “The situation,” conclude the authors, “does not bode well for our nation’s ability to deal effectively with the wide range of environmental problems — from local toxics to global climate change — we currently face.”

Here in the United States, we fret a lot about global warming denial. Not only is it a dangerous delusion, it’s an incredibly prevalent one. Depending on your survey instrument of choice, we regularly learn that substantial minorities of Americans deny, or are skeptical of, the science of climate change.

The global picture, however, is quite different. For instance, recently the U.K.-based market research firm Ipsos MORI released its “Global Trends 2014” report, which included a number of survey questions on the environment asked across 20 countries. (h/t Leo Hickman). And when it came to climate change, the result was very telling:

Note that these results are not perfectly comparable across countries, because the data were gathered online, and Ipsos MORI cautions that for developing countries like India and China, “the results should be viewed as representative of a more affluent and ‘connected’ population.”

Nonetheless, some pretty significant patterns are apparent. Perhaps most notably: Not only is the United States clearly the worst in its climate denial, but Great Britain and Australia are second and third worst, respectively. Canada, meanwhile, is the seventh worst.

What do these four nations have in common? They all speak the language of Shakespeare.

Why would that be? After all, presumably there is nothing about English, in and of itself, that predisposes you to climate change denial. Words and phrases like “doubt,” “natural causes,” “climate models,” and other skeptic mots are readily available in other languages. So what’s the real cause?

One possible answer is that it’s all about the political ideologies prevalent in these four countries.

“I do not find these results surprising,” says Riley Dunlap, a sociologist at Oklahoma State University who has extensively studied the climate denial movement. “It’s the countries where neo-liberalism is most hegemonic and with strong neo-liberal regimes (both in power and lurking on the sidelines to retake power) that have bred the most active denial campaigns — U.S., U.K., Australia, and now Canada. And the messages employed by these campaigns filter via the media and political elites to the public, especially the ideologically receptive portions.” (Neoliberalism is an economic philosophy centered on the importance of free markets and broadly opposed to big government interventions.)

Indeed, the English language media in three of these four countries are linked together by a single individual: Rupert Murdoch. An apparent climate skeptic or lukewarmer, Murdoch is the chair of News Corp and 21st Century Fox. (You can watch him express his climate views here.) Some of the media outlets subsumed by the two conglomerates that he heads are responsible for quite a lot of English language climate skepticism and denial.

In the U.S., Fox News and The Wall Street Journal lead the way; research shows that Fox watching increases distrust of climate scientists. (You can also catch Fox News in Canada.) In Australia, a recent study found that slightly under a third of climate-related articles in 10 top Australian newspapers “did not accept” the scientific consensus on climate change, and that News Corp papers — The Australian, The Herald Sun, and The Daily Telegraph — were particular hotbeds of skepticism. “The Australian represents climate science as matter of opinion or debate rather than as a field for inquiry and investigation like all scientific fields,” noted the study.

And then there’s the U.K. A 2010 academic study found that while News Corp outlets in this country from 1997 to 2007 did not produce as much strident climate skepticism as did their counterparts in the U.S. and Australia, “the Sun newspaper offered a place for scornful sceptics on its opinion pages as did The Times and Sunday Times to a lesser extent.” (There are also other outlets in the U.K., such as the Daily Mail, that feature plenty of skepticism but aren’t owned by News Corp.)

Thus, while there may not be anything inherent to the English language that impels climate denial, the fact that English language media are such a major source of that denial may in effect create a language barrier.

And media aren’t the only reason that denialist arguments are more readily available in the English language. There’s also the Anglophone nations’ concentration of climate “skeptic” think tanks, which provide the arguments and rationalizations necessary to feed this anti-science position. According to a study in Climatic Change earlier this year, the U.S. is home to 91 different organizations (think tanks, advocacy groups, and trade associations) that collectively comprise a “climate change counter-movement.” The annual funding of these organizations, collectively, is “just over $900 million.” That is a truly massive amount of English-speaking climate “skeptic” activity, and while the study was limited to the U.S., it is hard to imagine that anything comparable exists in non-English speaking countries.

Ben Page, the chief executive of Ipsos MORI (which released the data) adds another possible causative factor behind the survey’s results, noting that environmental concern is very high in China today, due to the omnipresent conditions of environmental pollution. By contrast, that’s not a part of your everyday experience in England or Australia. “In many surveys in China, environment is the top concern,” Page comments. “In contrast, in the west, it’s a long way down the list behind the economy and crime.”

Whatever the precise concatenation of causes, the evidence seems clear. We English speakers have a special problem when it comes to understanding and accepting climate science. In language, we’re Anglophones; but in climate science, we’re a bunch of Anglophonies.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes orRSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ on iTunes — you can learn more here.

You don’t know it yet. There’s no way that you could. But 400 years from now, a historian will write that the time in which you’re now living is the “Penumbral Age” of human history — meaning, the period when a dark shadow began to fall over us all. You’re living at the start of a new dark age, a new counter-Enlightenment. Why? Because too many of us living today, in the years just after the turn of the millennium, deny the science of climate change.

Such is the premise of a thought-provoking new work of “science-based fiction” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, two historians of science (Oreskes at Harvard, Conway at Caltech) best known for their classic 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. In a surprising move, they have now followed up that expose of the roots of modern science denialism with a work of “cli-fi,” or climate science fiction, entitledThe Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. [SPOILER ALERT: Much of the plot of this book will be revealed below!] In it, Oreskes and Conway write from the perspective of a historian, living in China (the country that fared the best in facing the ravages of climate change) in the year 2393. The historian seeks to analyze the biggest paradox imaginable: Why humans who saw the climate disaster coming, who were thoroughly and repeatedly warned, did nothing about it.

So why did two historians turn to sci-fi? On the latest installment of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Oreskes explained that after the extensive research that went into Merchants of Doubt, she and Conway “felt like we really understood the science, but we also felt that the scientific community had really not explained why any of this mattered. And we just kept coming back to this idea of, how do we really talk about why this matters, and not just for polar bears, and not just for people living in far flung places or far into the future, but what’s really at stake.”

The resulting book, The Collapse of Western Civilization, diverges in many respects from other cli-fi works, such as the novels of Kim Stanley Robinson (who clearly influenced Oreskes and Conway, and who blurbed their new book). Collapse is quite short, and hardly a study in character or plot. It has one narrator, and that narrator is a “scholar,” approaching the topic analytically. The force of the story, then, comes not so much from dramatic elements, but rather, from its simple conceit: How would a fair-minded thinker, living 400 years from now, evaluate us?

The answer couldn’t be more depressing: We got it all wrong. We sacrificed our birthright. We unleashed ravaging heat waves, destabilized ice sheets, shot chemicals into the skies in a failed attempt to fix our mess, then halted that intervention and made everything still worse. (All of these things unfold in the story.)

The consequences were toppled governments, mass migrations, and unimaginable human tragedy from starvation, dehydration, and disease. Finally came the “collapse” itself, not of Western civilization at first, but of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which in the late 21st century rapidly disintegrated, driving up sea levels some five meters. Much of Greenland soon followed.

“We were trying to sort of play on this two different senses of ‘collapse,'” explained Oreskes on Inquiring Minds. Summarizing the plot of the book, she elaborated as follows: “The West Antarctic Ice Sheet does collapse, causing massive rapid sea-level rise, which then puts into effect a kind of chain of events, which ultimately leads to the collapse of political and cultural institutions as well.”

This is a worst-case scenario, but it is far from crazy in light of our current trajectory. And we are on this trajectory because we’re ignoring the evidence all around us. “A shadow of ignorance and denial had fallen over people who considered themselves children of the Enlightenment,” writes Oreskes’ and Conway’s historian, explaining why our present era will later be called the “Period of the Penumbra.”

So why are we currently on course to be remembered for causing humanity’s greatest failure? The historian singles out two causes in particular, the first of which may be surprising.

First off, the historian argues that our scientists failed us, and in a very particular way: They failed us by being too conservative. Scientists today know full well that the “95 percent confidence limit” (the requirement to statistically establish that there is less than a 1-in-20 chance that a given scientific result is due to chance — or, a 19 in 20 chance that it is real — before it can be accepted) is merely a convention, not a law of the universe. Nonetheless, this convention, the historian suggests, led scientists to be far too cautious, far too easily disrupted by the doubt-mongering of denialists, and far too unwilling to shout from the rooftops what they all knew was happening.

“We have come to understand the 95 percent confidence limit as a social convention rooted in scientists’ desire to demonstrate their disciplinary severity,” writes the historian. “Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did.” The historian even cites the currently live issue of the relationship between hurricanes and global warming: It is very likely that global warming is changing these storms in some way, but showing that in a way that satisfies all of the relevant experts has proven very difficult.

Why target scientists in particular in this book? Simply because a distant future historian would too, says Oreskes. “If you think about historians who write about the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Mayans or the Incans, it’s always about trying to understand all of the factors that contributed,” she says. “So we felt that we had to say something about scientists.”

Naomi Oreskes.Andy Tankersley

And then, there are the ideologues. They are, of course, vastly more culpable than the scientists. Here, The Collapse of Western Civilization picks up a theme from Merchants of Doubt: Free market ideologues, trained on the idea that the Soviet Union was the root of all evil, converted to an economic religion of their own dubbed “neoliberalism,” defined as “the idea that free market systems were the only economic systems that did not threaten individual liberty.” Unfortunately for this worldview, market failures do exist, and climate change is the granddaddy of them all. But too many neoliberal ideologues couldn’t accept that, so they doubled down on fantasy. (These are the climate change denying libertarians that we all know so well.)

In The Collapse of Western Civilization, neoliberals receive a comeuppance for this that is appropriate in its dramatic irony. The book ends by noting that China, a country not exactly wedded to freedom of thought or free markets, nevertheless survived climate calamity the best, thanks to its ability to exercise the centralized power of the state to force rapid climate adaptation. Eighty percent of Chinese thus survived the climate cataclysm. Other nations soon followed suit, also growing more autocratic.

Oreskes is not applauding this, of course; rather, she’s suggesting that it could be a very, very painful irony resulting from the behavior of neoliberals. “It could well be the case that the authoritarian nations are actually better situated to deal with climate disruption than the liberal democracies,” says Oreskes. “And we want to suggest that that’s a very worrisome thought.”

So can we still prevent ourselves from writing the story of The Collapse of Western Civilization — a story in which the historian narrator repeatedly points out missed opportunities, when something could have been done to prevent the disaster that followed? Oreskes thinks the answer is yes.

“It’s not too late. We do still have opportunities,” she says. “But if we continue the way we’ve been going, and we continue to miss these opportunities, there is going to become a point of no return.”

We’ve known for some time that as Republicans become more highly educated, or better at general science comprehension, they become stronger in their global warming denial. It’s a phenomenon I’ve called the “smart idiot” effect: Apparently being highly informed or capable interacts with preexisting political biases to make those on the right more likely to be wrong than they would be if they had less education or knowledge.

Now, a new study in the journal Climatic Change has identified a closely related phenomenon. Call it the “rich idiot” effect: The study finds that among Republicans, as levels of income increase, so does their likelihood of “dismissing the dangers associated with climate change.” But among Democrats and independents, there is little or no change in climate views as levels of income increase or decrease.

The study, by Jeremiah Bohr of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was based on an analysis of preexisting data from the 2010 installment of the General Social Survey — a leading source of survey information about the U.S. public. In addition to questions about levels of education, income, and political party affiliation, the survey asked the following: “In general, do you think that a rise in the world’s temperature caused by climate change is extremely dangerous for the environment, very dangerous, somewhat dangerous, not very dangerous, or not dangerous at all for the environment?”

Bohr looked specifically at those individuals who chose the “not very dangerous” or “not dangerous at all” options. And he found that at the lowest income level, the probability that a Republican would give one of these dismissive answers was only 17.7 percent. But at the highest income level, it was 51.2 percent. Here’s a visualization of the chief finding, showing how the likelihood of a Republican giving one of these answers changes in relation to wealth:

This therefore leads to a surprising conclusion: “At the bottom quintile of income, Republicans are not significantly different from either Independents or Democrats” with respect to their denial of climate risks, the study reports. It’s only as income increases that Republicans become so much more likely to be deniers.

So why does this occur? There are several possibilities discussed in the paper.

The first is that income is actually a proxy for something else: Namely, being politically aware. It’s possible that being wealthy is related to paying more attention to politics and your political party, and people who do so would be more aware of what those who agree with them on other issues actually think about global warming. (The study controlled for another possible influencing factor, education.)

The other possibility, though, is that climate denial is a defense of economic interests. “Among individuals with conservative political orientations, there is a correlation between occupying advantageous positions within industrial economic systems and an unwillingness to acknowledge the risks associated with climate change,” Bohr writes. “Perhaps to validate their economic interests, these individuals are more likely to process information on climate science through political filters that result in denying the risks produced by climate change.”

For many years, the U.S. National Science Foundation, more recently with the help of the General Social Survey, has asked the public the same true or false question about evolution:“Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.” And for many years, the responses to this question have been dismal. In 2006, 2008, and 2010, for instance, less than half of the public correctly answered “true.”

In 2012, however, the NSF and GSS conducted an experiment to try to better understand why people fare so badly on this evolution question. For half of survey respondents, the words “according to the theory of evolution” were added to the beginning of the statement above. And while only 48 percent gave the correct answer to the unaltered question, an impressive 72 percent correctly answered the new, prefaced version.

So why such a huge gap? Perhaps the original question wasn’t tapping into scientific knowledge at all; rather, it was challenging the religious identity of creationists who think the earth is less than 10,000 years old. Presented with the new phrasing, however, even many creationists know what the theory of evolution states; they just deny that it is true. So are these people really “scientifically illiterate,” as many in the science world might claim, or are they instead … something else?

This is a vital question in the field of science communication, because at its core is the issue of whether we are dealing with mass public scientific illiteracy on the one hand (which presumably could be fixed by education), or with something much deeper and more intractable. What’s more, this problem isn’t confined to evolution. The issue of climate change may be very similar in this respect. Ask a polling question about climate change in one way, and you may cause conservatives to reassert their ideological identities, and reject the most important finding of climate science (that humans are causing global warming). But ask it in another way and, well, it may turn out that they know what the science says after all (even if they don’t personally believe it).

Such is the finding of a new paper by Yale law professor and communication researcher Dan Kahan, recently profiled in depth by Ezra Klein in a much read Vox article aptly titled “How politics makes us stupid.” Kahan is becoming widely known for his research showing that political ideology interferes with our most basic reasoning abilities; even our math skills, it seems, go right out the window when political passions come into play. In this new paper, though, Kahan isn’t showing how dumb we are. Rather, he’s doing the opposite: Showing that if you ask the questions the right way, Americans know a lot more about climate science than you might think. (Even conservatives.)

To understand Kahan’s analysis, it helps to start where much of his prior research — extensively covered by Klein, myself, and others — left off. Kahan has defined a measure that he calls “ordinary science intelligence,” which assesses how good people are at mathematical and scientific reasoning and at questioning their own beliefs. Using this survey tool, he is able to present evidence showing that (1) as people get better at science, they are more likely in general to affirm that global warming is mostly due to human activities; but (2) as soon as you split people up in to liberals and conservatives, that conclusion goes out the window. Actually, liberals get way better in their answers as their science ability increases, and conservatives get considerably worse:

Probability of giving the correct answer on a question about climate change in relation to individuals’ political ideology and science “intelligence.” Click to embiggen.

This “smart idiot” effect has prompted a ton of hand-wringing on the left; by now, Kahan has captured it in many studies. In the context of the current research, though, he’s just getting started.

Mirroring the NSF’s approach to evolution, Kahan created a new questionnaire that he hopes can more extensively measure people’s knowledge about the science of climate change. But — crucially — in this questionnaire, most of the questions started out with the phrase “climate scientists believe that …” Such is Kahan’s attempt (only an initial one, he stresses) to disentangle people’s identities and political ideology from what they just plain know.

Here are some of the questionnaire items, and how members of the public tended to fare on them, plotted in relation to how climate science literate they were:

Examples of “Ordinary Climate Science Intelligence” items and the public’s probability of giving the right answers. Answers (from left to right, top to bottom) are “carbon dioxide,” “true,” “false,” and “false.” Click to embiggen.Dan Kahan

Next, Kahan examined the patterns of responses based on ideology. This time, though, he no longer saw a performance split between those on the left and those on the right. Nor did he see a uniform pattern in which liberals tended to be more correct with higher levels of intelligence or science literacy, even as conservatives were more incorrect. Rather, sometimes the two groups were nearly the same in their performance, and sometimes one group did a little better or a little worse than the other:

Left right differences in responses to climate science “intelligence” questions. Correct answers (from left to right, top to bottom) are “carbon dioxide,” “true,” “false,” and “false.” Click to embiggen.Dan Kahan

Granted, there is an argument to be made that part of this depends on the nature of the questions. Kahan threw in a number of trick questions, including one that almost everybody got wrong: “Climate scientists believe that if the North Pole icecap melted as a result of human-caused global warming, global sea levels would rise.” That’s true of the South Pole, because the vast Antarctic Ice Sheet sits atop a landmass. It’s also true of Greenland. But it’s not true of the North Pole, where the ice cap is comprised of floating sea ice, whose melting won’t raise sea levels any more than the melting of ice cubes on a summer day causes your glass of water to overflow.

There was another noteworthy pattern in question responses. Whenever Kahan posed a question about a risk of global warming that turned out not to be real — for instance, “Climate scientists believe that human-caused global warming will increase the risk of skin cancer in human beings” — he tended to trick liberals a bit more than conservatives. But that’s simply because liberals were more inclined to believe bad things about climate change, and conservatives to dismiss them.

In any event, Kahan concludes, on the basis of these results, that the public basically does understand climate science, on both sides of the aisle. “Everyone has gotten the memo on what ‘climate scientists believe,'” he writes. It’s just that there are certain questions, and certain ways of phrasing them, that lead conservatives to trumpet their political identities, rather than express their knowledge, in response to survey questions. Or as Kahan writes:

The problem is not that members of the public do not know enough, either about climate science or the weight of scientific opinion, to contribute intelligently as citizens to the challenges posed by climate change. It’s that the questions posed to them by those communicating information on global warming in the political realm have nothing to do with — are not measuring — what ordinary citizens know.

Conservatives will probably be elated by these findings. But for others, Kahan’s conclusions are likely to be quite controversial, especially since he packages them alongside a critique of a leading strategy to communicate the reality of climate change, namely, by emphasizing that 97 percent of scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. Kahan thinks that’s a way of pushing conservatives’ political identity buttons, rather than tapping into their knowledge. (For a rebuttal to Kahan’s criticisms from John Cook, one of the authors of the original study demonstrating that 97 percent of published papers — that take a stance on the matter — accept the scientific consensus on climate change, see here.)

Still, those who wish to communicate to the public about climate change will have to grapple with Kahan’s assertion that conservatives really aren’t ignorant about the issue — they’re just highly prone to defend their worldviews when asked certain kinds of questions. If Kahan is right, the implication is that we need to talk about climate science in a way that is entirely devoid of cultural meanings that will antagonize the right.

Later in the paper, Kahan goes on to assert that precisely this strategy is working right now in Southeast Florida, where members of the Regional Climate Change Compact have brought on board politically diverse constituencies by studiously avoiding pushing anyone’s buttons. Kahan even shows polling data suggesting that questions like “local and state officials should be involved in identifying steps that local communities can take to reduce the risk posed by rising sea levels” do not provoke a polarized response in this region. Rather, liberals and conservatives alike in Southeast Florida agree with such a statement, which references a major consequence of climate change while ignoring the gigantic elephant in the room … its cause.

Here’s the problem, though. Maybe this approach will work up to a point, or in certain locales (in North Carolina, the response to sea level rise is pretty different). But at some point, we really do need to all agree that the globe is warming, so that we can then make very difficult choices on how to deal with that. To save our feverish planet, it is dubious that merely having conservatives know what scientists think — rather than accepting it themselves, taking the reality into their hearts and identities — will be enough.

On a previous episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Dan Kahan debated psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky about how to communicate the science of climate change:

Filed under: Climate & Energy, Politics]]>http://grist.org/climate-energy/conservatives-dont-deny-climate-science-because-theyre-ignorant-they-deny-it-because-of-who-they-are/feed/0shrug.jpgDan Kahan.Probability of giving the correct answer on a question about climate change in relation to individuals' political ideology and science "intelligence." Click to embiggen.Examples of "Ordinary Climate Science Intelligence" items and the public's probability of giving the right answers. Answers (from left to right, top to bottom) are "carbon dioxide," "true," "false," and "false." Click to embiggen.Left right differences in responses to climate science "intelligence" questions. Correct answers (from left to right, top to bottom) are "carbon dioxide," "true," "false," and "false." Click to embiggen.Climate DeskJon Stewart explains how to make GOP senators care about climatehttp://grist.org/climate-energy/jon-stewart-explains-how-to-make-gop-senators-care-about-climate/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_chrismooney
http://grist.org/climate-energy/jon-stewart-explains-how-to-make-gop-senators-care-about-climate/#commentsSat, 21 Jun 2014 12:34:35 +0000http://grist.org/?p=246809]]>

There’s no better evidence of how much the Republican Party has changed on the environment than this: The fact that Environmental Protection Agency administrators who served under Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush all think global warming is real and we should do something about it.

On Wednesday, this quartet — William Ruckelshaus, who served under both Nixon and Reagan; Lee Thomas, who served under Reagan; William Reilly, who served under George Bush Sr., and Christine Todd Whitman, who served under George W. Bush — testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee. But as the Huffington Post’s Kate Sheppard reports, the Republican senators present “mostly ignored” their testimony.

The whole spectacle was enough to inspire a Jon Stewart rant, one that is truly priceless. Watch:

Two weeks ago in the eastern Pacific hurricane basin, we saw Category 4 Hurricane Amanda, which was too strong, too early. Amanda was the “strongest May hurricane on record in the eastern Pacific basin during the satellite era,” noted the National Hurricane Center.

And right now, the basin is host to Category 4 Hurricane Cristina, which follows on Amanda’s record with a new one. The storm just put on an “extraordinary” burst of intensification in the last 24 hours, rocketing from Category 1 to Category 4 strength, with maximum sustained wind speeds of 150 miles per hour. And now that it has gotten there, notes the National Hurricane Center, we have another new record:

Cristina is the earliest 2nd major hurricane formation in the ern Pacific (reliable records since 1971) by 13 days, old record Darby 2010

This year is also the first time there have been two Category 4 hurricanes before July 1 in the Eastern Pacific. Prior to Cristina, the earliest second Category 4 hurricane was Hurricane Elida in 1984, which reached that threshold on July 1.

As I’ve noted before, the eastern Pacific basin tends to be very active in El Niño years. We are not officially in an El Niño right now, but the forecast for one developing this summer is now 70 percent. In this case, maybe the eastern Pacific is ahead of the forecasters in responding to the state of the ocean and atmosphere.

As of now, Hurricane Cristina is expected to travel westward, harmlessly, out to sea.

David Brat, the Virginia economics professor and Tea Partier who just beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a Republican primary, is a staunch libertarian. And these days, that doesn’t just mean thinking the free market should run most things, from the energy sector to health care. It also often means denying the reality of global warming.

In a recent campaign event video (which has since been made private), Brat explains his free-marketeer perspective on environmental and energy problems. Naturally, he believes that American ingenuity will lead the way to a cleaner environment. But he also hints at a disbelief in the science of global warming, and alludes to a well-worn myth that has been widely used on the right to undermine trust in climate scientists — the idea that just a few decades ago, in the 1970s, climate experts all thought we were headed into “another Ice Age.”

Here’s how Brat put it: “If you let Americans do their thing, there is no scarcity, right? They said we’re going to run out of food 200 years ago, and then we’re going to have another ice age. Now it’s, we’re heating up … .” At this point, Brat waves his hand dismissively.

I reached out to the Brat campaign to ask if he believes in human-caused climate change; they did not immediately respond. Regardless, the myth that climate scientists, in the 1970s, all thought a new Ice Age was coming has been widely asserted by conservative and libertarian types ranging from George Will to Michael Crichton. And no wonder: It serves their political goals. It makes climate scientists seem quirky, wishy-washy, leaping from one conclusion to another.

But it’s highly misleading.

In 2008, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a full article dedicated to debunking this myth. Here’s a short excerpt:

… the following pervasive myth arose: there was a consensus among climate scientists of the 1970s that either global cooling or a full-fledged ice age was imminent . … A review of the climate science literature from 1965 to 1979 shows this myth to be false. The myth’s basis lies in a selective misreading of the texts both by some members of the media at the time and by some observers today. In fact, emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then.

So where did this odd idea — that within relatively recent memory, climate scientists were all worried about cooling, not warming — come from? After all, as far back as 1965, Lyndon Johnson’s President’s Science Advisory Committee detailed the risk of global warming due to fossil-fuel burning in an extensive appendix to a report on the environment. Concerns about warming were prominent even then.

Nonetheless, the 1970s were part of a temporary cooling trend, at least in the northern hemisphere, and some journalists caught on. Some scientists also fanned the flames. Perhaps most notably, in 1975 Newsweek magazine ran a story entitled “The Cooling World.” This is arguably the most frequently cited piece of evidence for those who claim that scientists, at the time, thought global cooling was coming. That’s even though the story’s author, Peter Gwynne, has himself set the record straight, writing, “Several atmospheric scientists did indeed believe in global cooling, as I reported in the April 28, 1975 issue of Newsweek. But that was then.”

And even then, this was certainly not a consensus position in the scientific community. The American Meteorological Society paper shows, through a scientific literature review, that from 1965 to 1979, “only 7 articles indicated cooling compared to 44 indicating warming.” Sure enough, by 1979, a major National Academy of Sciences report could be found highlighting the global warming threat and stating that if carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere double, we could see a warming of between 1.5 and 4 degrees Celsius.

So no, scientists didn’t unanimously say, “We’re going to have another ice age.” And getting this right really matters. Because it shows that contrary to what Brat suggests, climate researchers are not mercurial, and were not all wrong just a few decades ago. And that, in turn, underscores the reality that their current conclusion — that humans are causing global warming — is based on a long-running and extremely well-established body of research and thinking.

If you care about the place of science in our culture, then this has to be the best news in a very long time. Last Sunday night, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey — which airs on Fox and then the next day on the National Geographic Channel — actually tied ABC’s The Bachelorette for the top ratings among young adult viewers, the “key demographic” coveted by advertisers. And it did so by — that’s right — airing an episode about the reality of climate change.

Tuesday evening, I had the privilege of sitting down with the show’s host, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, to discuss this milestone, and how he feels generally as the 13-part series comes to a close. (The final episode, entitled “Unafraid of the Dark,” airs this Sunday night.) “The ratings are exceeding our expectations,” said Tyson, fresh off the climate episode triumph. But Tyson emphasized that to him, that’s not the most important fact: Rather, it’s that a science show aired at all in primetime on Sunday night.

“You had entertainment writers putting The Walking Dead in the same sentence as Cosmos,” said Tyson. “Game of Thrones in the same sentence of Cosmos. ‘How’s Cosmos doing against Game of Thrones?’ That is an extraordinary fact, no matter what ratings it earned.”

I spoke with Tyson in the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Hall in D.C., below a painting of the society’s founders signing its charter in 1888. Tyson, wearing a glittering space-themed tie, sipped white wine before moving upstairs to a reception where he was destined for an hour of handshakes and selfies. Later that evening — after a special advance airing of the final episode of Cosmos — he would electrify a packed room by explaining to a young girl how solar flares work, a display that involved him sprawling across the stage (and his fellow panelists) as he contorted his body to mimic the dynamics of the sun’s plasma. The show concluded with Tyson explaining how “plasma pies” (as he dubbed them), ejected towards us by our star, ultimately become the aurora borealis and the aurora australis.

There were other Cosmos luminaries on the stage — including executive producers Brannon Braga and Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s widow — but Tyson won the room that night. Easily.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, surveying some of the universe’s awesomeness in Cosmos.Fox/National Geographic

Overall, Tyson notes, Cosmos premiered not only on Fox but on National Geographic Channel and, globally, in 181 countries and 46 languages. “It tells you that science is trending in our culture,” Tyson averred to me. “And if science is trending, that can only be good for the health, the wealth, and the security of our species, of our civilization.”

And yet, many members of our species still deny that the globe is warming thanks to human activities — a point that Cosmos has not only made a centerpiece but that, the program has frankly argued, threatens civilization as we know it. Tyson is know for being fairly non-confrontational; for not wanting to directly argue with or debate those who deny science in various areas. He prefers to just tell it like it is, to educate. But when we talked he was, perhaps, a little more blunt than usual.

“At some point, I don’t know how much energy they have to keep fighting it,” he said of those who don’t accept the science of climate change. “It’s an emergent scientific truth.” Tyson added that in the political sphere, denying the science is just a bad strategy. “The Republican Party, so many of its members are resistant to embracing the facts of climate change that the legislation that they should be eager to influence, they’re left outside the door,” said Tyson. “Because they think the debate is whether or not it’s happening, rather than what policy and legislation can serve their interests going forward.”

You can argue, in fact, that that is exactly what happened this week. One day after Cosmos’ highly rated climate episode aired, the EPA announced its new regulations for power plant carbon dioxide emissions. The whole reason that the Obama administration went this route — regulating carbon via the Clean Air Act — was that climate legislation (the first option, and the more desirable option) was impossible. The legislative math didn’t work. It would never pass.

Now, Republicans are extraordinarily upset by the EPA’s rules, as the agency moves in to fill a legislative vacuum. But thanks to their denial, they may well have lost their chance to find a more ideologically desirable solution, like a carbon tax. (In fairness, some coal state Democrats were also responsible for the failure of cap-and-trade legislation in Congress. West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin famously shot the bill with a rifle in an ad for his 2010 Senate campaign.)

That’s bad for our politics, just as climate change is bad for our civilization — but it is surely some small saving grace to at least learn, thanks to Tyson and Cosmos, that science is not bad for the television business. The success of Cosmos, Tyson thinks, changes what can be on TV; how future network programmers will think, in the future, about what constitutes desirable content.

“It will open up their definition of what can be in primetime television,” he said.

On our most popular episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Neil Tyson explained why he doesn’t debate science deniers, and much more. You can listen here (interview starts around minute 13):

Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced its much anticipated plans to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants, the source of about a third of U.S. emissions. It turns out the regulations will be pretty ambitious: a 30 percent decrease in emissions in this sector from 2005 levels by the year 2030 (though some say that is still not enough).

Critics are out in force, of course, and their chief tactic seems to be economic alarmism. Earlier this morning, the front page of Drudge Report displayed this image (bizarrely, as the new rules have nothing to do with oil and wouldn’t drive up gas prices):

Drudge Report

Indeed, the economic doomsaying arguments are everywhere in relation to the new EPA rules. Even before the rules were announced, the National Mining Association was running ads claiming that “an 80 percent cost hike [in electricity bills] is something we better get used to if extreme new Obama administration power plant regulations take effect.” Also prior to the rules’ actual release, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce put out a study asserting that the consequence of the regulations would be 224,000 lost jobs per year and a $50 billion annual economic hit (up through the year 2030).

And then, there were the elected Republicans: James Inhofe, the Oklahoma senator, claimed the regulations would “cost Americans a fortune.” John Boehner, meanwhile, called them a “sucker punch for families everywhere.” And don’t miss tweets like these from members of Congress:

The EPA, of course, radically disagrees with all of this, and thinks the economic benefits of the new rules should greatly exceed their costs. So who should you trust?

Well, how about history: There is a long tradition of cost overestimates for new environmental regulations. At the Huffington Post, Pacific Institute President Peter Gleick provides an extensive documentation, going back to the 1970s, arguing that such claims of huge costs not only have a long history, but that they are “always wrong.”

Among other things, Gleick links to a 2011 EPA study finding that the benefits of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments (which, of course, were attacked on grounds of supposed cost) “exceeded costs by a factor of more than 30 to one.” That’s not the only such study. In fact, as the World Resources Institute’s Ruth Greenspan Bell has noted, from 1999 to 2009, EPA water and clean-air regulations overall were clear cost-benefit winners. The total costs, according to a 2010 Office of Management and Budget report, were some $26-$29 billion, while the benefits were far greater: $82-$533 billion.

Dubiousness aside, the striking thing about all of these attacks is that they’re depressingly presentist, missing the big picture about the transformative effect that climate change is having on our world as it unleashes stunning impacts whose ultimate costs are sure to be mindboggling (like, say, 10 feet of sea-level rise affecting every coastal city on the planet).

Fortunately, we turned to Bill Nye the Science Guy for some bigger picture perspective. He gave us this statement today: “We have a long way to go in addressing climate change,” he said. “Coal will be controversial for a long time yet. But the longest journey starts with a single step. This is a good one. Let’s get started.”

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds viaiTunesorRSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ on iTunes — you can learn more here.

Remember “Climategate”? It was the 2009 non-scandal scandal in which a trove of climate scientists’ emails, pilfered from the University of East Anglia in the U.K., were used to call all of modern climate research into question. Why? Largely because a cursory reading of those emails — showing, for example, climate scientists frankly discussing how to respond to burdensome data requests and attacks on their work — revealed a side of researchers that most people aren’t really used to seeing. Suddenly, these “experts” looked more like ordinary human beings who speak their minds, who sometimes have emotions and rivalries with one another, and (shocker) don’t really like people who question the validity of their knowledge.

In other words, Climategate demonstrated something that sociologists of science have know for some time — that scientists are mortals, just like all the rest of us. “What was being exposed was not something special and local but ‘business as usual’ across the whole scientific world,” writes Cardiff University scholar Harry Collins, one of the original founders of the field of “science studies,” in his masterful new book, Are We All Scientific Experts Now? But that means that Climategate didn’t undermine the case for human-caused global warming at all, says Collins. Rather, it demonstrated why it is so hard for ordinary citizens to understand what is going on inside the scientific community — much less to snipe and criticize it from the outside. They simply don’t grasp how researchers work on a day-to-day basis, or what kind of shared knowledge exists within the group.

That’s a case that Collins makes not only about the climate issue, but also to rebut vaccine deniers, HIV-AIDS skeptics, and all manner of scientific cranks and mavericks. All of them, he argues, are failing to understand what’s so important and powerful about a group of experts coming to a scientific consensus. “If we devalue scientific attitudes and scientific values, we’re going to find ourselves living in an unpleasant society,” explains Collins on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast.

Defenses of scientific expertise have been published before — but the source of this particular defense is what is likely to surprise a lot of people. There was a time, after all, when people like Collins — sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars studying science itself — were deemed to be researchers’ worst enemies, rather than their staunchest defenders. The so-called “science wars” between these two camps peaked with the 1996 “Sokal Hoax,” in which one NYU physicist, Alan Sokal, got so fed up with so-called “postmodern” critics of scientific knowledge that he spoofed them by submitting a gibberish-laden article, entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” to one of their own journals. The paper got published, to Sokal’s delight.

Harry Collins.

For hard scientists like Sokal, science studies scholars were wrongly asserting that since it occurs in a cultural context and is heavily influenced by many non-scientific factors (the gender and race of researchers, for instance), science doesn’t really have any special claim to objective knowledge. Rather, scientific expertise was deemed to be just as contingent, just as sociologically determined, as anyone else’s belief system.

That’s why it’s so significant to find Collins, in his new book, laying out a robust defense of scientific expertise and arguing, as he puts it, that “scientists are a special group of people … in terms of the values that drive their lives and their aspirations in respect of how they live their lives.”

That’s not to say that Collins thinks the sociological study of science, which he and his colleagues pioneered, was a worthless endeavor. Coming out of the 1950s heyday, he argues, scientists were treated as almost mythic luminaries and geniuses who couldn’t be questioned. And that just wasn’t accurate. “What we were doing was saying things like, ‘Let’s get away from the mythological picture of science, the myth of what goes on in the lab, and let’s go and talk to scientists,'” explains Collins.

In Collins’ case, he embedded for over a decade with the community of gravitational wave physicists, becoming so familiar with their culture that he was actually able, in an experiment, to trick expert physicists into thinking he was really one of them. Through such careful investigations, Collins and his colleagues were able to debunk a variety of myths about science, including the idea that it is full of instantaneous strokes of genius or “Eureka moments” — as well as the myth that scientists always follow the data where it leads, rather than clinging to older but established paradigms in the face of new evidence. A book that played a major role in kicking off the science studies wave, after all, was Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which showed how older communities of scientists initially resisted new knowledge, from the Copernican revolution all the way to the Einsteinian one.

The upshot is that while the scientific process works in the long run, in the shorter term it is very messy — full of foibles, errors, confusions, and personalities.

So it’s not that Collins now repudiates his older research. He just thinks some scholars took it all too far, winding up in radically postmodernist positions that really did seem to devalue expertise and scientific knowledge. “It just seemed to me that we were moving into a position where, at least in the narrow academic world of my colleagues, it was ceasing to be possible to talk about experts,” says Collins. “If you said, ‘So and so is an expert,’ you were accused of being an elitist.”

Polity.

Collins’ new book is, in essence, a thorough answer to this objection. Based in significant part on the so-called “Periodic Table of Expertises” that he and his colleagues at Cardiff developed, Collins carefully delineates between different types of claims to knowledge. And in the process, he rescues the idea that there’s something very special about being a member of an expert, scientific community, which cannot be duplicated by people like vaccine critic Jenny McCarthy, who told Time magazine in 2009 that “I do believe sadly it’s going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe.” And why would McCarthy think, in the face of scientific consensus, that the current ones aren’t? Well, she once remarked that she began her autism research at the “University of Google.”

Read all the online stuff you want, Collins argues — or even read the professional scientific literature from the perspective of an outsider or amateur. You’ll absorb a lot of information, but you’ll still never have what he terms “interactional expertise,” which is the sort of expertise developed by getting to know a community of scientists intimately, and getting a feeling for what they think.

“If you get your information only from the journals, you can’t tell whether a paper is being taken seriously by the scientific community or not,” says Collins. “You cannot get a good picture of what is going on in science from the literature,” he continues. And of course, biased and ideological internet commentaries on that literature are more dangerous still.

That’s why we can’t listen to climate change skeptics or creationists. It’s why vaccine deniers don’t have a leg to stand on. And, in a somewhat older example, that’s why what happened in South Africa, when president Thabo Mbeki rejected the scientific consensus on what causes HIV-AIDS and opted to base government policies on the views of a few scientific outliers, is so troubling.

To justify the decision not to distribute anti-retroviral AIDS drugs, says Collins, Mbeki “told his parliamentary colleagues to read the internet, and they’d see that there was a controversy about the safety of anti-retroviral drugs. There was no controversy. There was a controversy on the internet, but there was no controversy in mainstream science any longer. It had long, long, long passed its sell-by date.” Interactional scientific expertise, says Collins, is what allows you to know that — and if you don’t have it, you are really not in any position to call into question mainstream knowledge.

The same goes for Climategate. For instance, one of the most attacked emails was one that was simply misunderstood by its attackers. The email referred to “Mike’s Nature trick … to hide the decline,” and it was assumed on this basis that scientists were doing something underhanded to suppress the fact that temperatures were supposedly declining. But that’s just incorrect, as you would have known if you were part of the community of scientists doing the research. The “decline” being referred to wasn’t even about global temperatures at all, but rather, a decline in the growth of certain trees whose rings were being used to infer past temperatures.

“What the scientists meant by ‘trick’ was, ‘a neat trick’ — ‘Hey, that was a really good piece of science,'” explains Collins. “Whereas the public were interpreting it as something tricky, disreputable, and underhand. So you’ve got to know the context in order to interpret what the very words mean, and you can only know the context by once again, being part of the oral culture of science.”

And then, finally, there is the vaccine issue. Here, Collins is perhaps at his strongest. Once again, there are smatterings of science that vaccine skeptics can cite, most of all, the now-retracted 1998 Lancet study that ignited the modern anti-vaccine furor. But that doesn’t put them in a position to judge the state of scientific expertise about vaccines, or to call into question an existing consensus about their safety. And in this case, ignoring or attacking expertise can be downright deadly. “We still have the measles epidemic in this country,” says Collins, “which was the result of people rebelling against injecting their children with MMR, on the basis of what’s, again, a complete piece of scientific trash.”

So can Collins’ new book, and his notion of “interactional expertise,” help reunite two communities of scholars who have been at loggerheads for too long — scientists and those in the humanities who study them? Collins certainly hopes so.

“What I’m trying to do in the book is to find … a way of revaluing science,” says Collins, “of putting science back into the center of our society — but without rejecting all the great work that was done from the ’70s onward, and without going back to the mythical 1950’s picture of science.”

For 11 episodes now, the groundbreaking Fox and National Geographic Channel series Cosmos has been exploring the universe, outraging creationists, and giving science teachers across the nation something to show in class every Monday. In the process, the show has been drawing more than 3 million viewers every Sunday night, a respectable number for a science-focused show that is, after all, a major departure from what prime-time audiences are used to.

Our journey begins with a trip to another world and time, an idyllic beach during the last perfect day on the planet Venus, right before a runaway greenhouse effect wreaks havoc on the planet, boiling the oceans and turning the skies a sickening yellow. We then trace the surprisingly lengthy history of our awareness of global warming and alternative energy sources, taking the Ship of the Imagination to intervene at some critical points in time.

Courtesy of National Geographic, above is a clip from the new episode, which should have climate deniers fulminating. In it, host Neil deGrasse Tyson uses the analogy of walking a dog on the beach to helpfully explain the difference between climate and weather (pay attention, Donald Trump) and to outline why, no matter how cold you were in January, that’s no argument against global warming.

We’ve seen the rest of the episode already, and won’t spill the beans. But suffice it to say that it contains some powerful refutations of a number of other global warming denier talking points, as well as some ingenious sequences that explain the planetary-scale significance of climate change. It also contains some in situ reporting on the impacts of climate change, straight from the imperiled Arctic.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson travels to the Arctic to explain global warming, and its effect on thawing permafrost, in this Sunday’s Cosmos episode.Fox/National Geographic

Back in November, I observed that if Carl Sagan, the creator and host of the original Cosmos series, were alive today, he would have been a leader in the charge to address global warming. After all, Sagan, who made his scientific mark studying the greenhouse effect of Venus, was deeply concerned about the megaforces that determine planetary fates.

In covering climate change so extensively then, the new Cosmosis living up to the legacy of its original creator.

Note: For those who miss it on Sunday, Cosmos also airs Monday, June 2 at 9 p.m. on National Geographic Channel with additional footage.

For over a decade, people like me have been explaining why so-called “balanced” coverage — in which journalists devote “equal time” to both sides of a “controversy” — is totally inappropriate when it comes to climate change. But many in the mass media, especially cable shows, have continued to regularly host climate “debates” in which one skeptic debates one climate science defender … or, lately, in which one skeptic debates Bill Nye the Science Guy.

That’s what made John Oliver’s climate segment last night, on his new HBO show Last Week Tonight, so perfect. Not only did Oliver explain why there’s no debate at all over global warming; he then demonstrated what an actually appropriate televised debate might look like. Bill Nye appeared on set, as did a climate “skeptic,” but then 96 other scientists appeared at Nye’s side (hilariously crowding onto the set) while their opponent got two additional supporters. These numbers — 97 and three — were based on a now-world famous study of published climate science papers, showing that 97 percent of studies that took a stand on whether humans are warming the planet said the answer is “yes.”

Thanks to the Obama administration’s high-profile rollout of the National Climate Assessment, climate change was, for a day yesterday, the nation’s leading story. Different media outlets approached it in different ways, but when it came to CNN’s Crossfire … well, not surprisingly, the show opted for a debate about the science.

The result was a lot of sound and fury, but at least the debater on the side of reality — Bill Nye the Science Guy — gave as good as he got. Nye was up against not only conservative host S.E. Cupp, who said the White House was engaging in global warming “scare tactics” and accused “science guys” of attempting to “bully other people,” but also Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation. Loris acknowledged that humans are responsible for “some part” of the changing climate and claimed that “I’m not a denier, I’m not a skeptic,” but he also asserted that “we’ve had Arctic ice, globally, increasing” (not!) and that “we’ve had this 16-to-17-year hiatus in warming.” (Actually, the notion that global warming is “slowing down” is very misleading.)

“Let’s just start with, we don’t agree on the facts,” Nye said to Loris and Cupp. “This third report [the National Climate Assessment] came out, saying it’s very serious. You say, ‘No.’ Right? There’s the essence of the problem.”

Watch it:

At another stage of the debate, Nye delivered the coup de grace: He asked both Cupp and Loris what would change their minds about the threat posed by climate change. Loris’ answer, amazingly, was better science — which was just delivered in the form of the National Climate Assessment. Watch it:

You have to slog through seas of misinformation to defend science these days. But deniers be warned: When you go up against an entertainer like Nye, you may not only be refuted … but it might also be pretty memorable.

If you’ve been reading my semi-regulardispatches about the Fox and National Geographic series Cosmos—far and away the most rational show on television—then you know that for some time, I’ve been not-so-subtly predicting that the program was going to tackle the scientific issue of our time, climate change. It seemed to me that in order to be true to the legacy of Carl Sagan, a man who epitomized the quest to use science to solve humanity’s problems, you simply couldn’t avoid this topic.

Neil deGrasse Tyson and Cosmos got into the climate issue in their typically expansive way: By surveying the state of the Earth in an array of ancient periods and looking at the dramatic transformations it has undergone due to forces ranging from continental drift, to asteroid impacts, to ice ages. Rearrangements of continents, waves of extinctions, and dramatic fluctuations in climate were the norm, not the exception, throughout this calamitous past.

And some of these dramatic changes set in motion where we are now. For instance, surveying the Carboniferous period of the planet’s history 300 million years ago, Tyson explained how the development of plant life on Earth, and especially trees, greatly changed its atmosphere, producing a great deal more oxygen. Yet at the time, Tyson noted, fungi and bacteria didn’t have any means of consuming these trees when they died. So, they just gradually sunk under the mud and soil.

“Eventually, there were hundreds of billions of trees, entombed in the Earth,” explains Tyson. “Buried forests, all over the Earth. What possible harm could come from that?”

Cosmos‘ “Ship of the Imagination,” with Neil deGrasse Tyson at the helm, surveys the Earth from space.Fox/National Geographic

The answer is a great deal, once the carbon content of these deposits of former life was unleashed into the atmosphere. And that’s why, while we’ve been living in a period of climatic optimum—one that made human civilization possible—for the last 10,000 years or so, we’re about to seriously mess it up. So begins Tyson’s climate dirge:

We just can’t seem to stop burning up all those buried trees from way back in the carboniferous age, in the form of coal, and the remains of ancient plankton, in the form of oil and gas. If we could, we’d be home free climate wise. Instead, we’re dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a rate the Earth hasn’t seen since the great climate catastrophes of the past, the ones that led to mass extinctions. We just can’t seem to break our addiction to the kinds of fuel that will bring back a climate last seen by the dinosaurs, a climate that will drown our coastal cities and wreak havoc on the environment and our ability to feed ourselves. All the while, the glorious sun pours immaculate free energy down upon us, more than we will ever need. Why can’t we summon the ingenuity and courage of the generations that came before us? The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What’s our excuse?

That’s a pretty strong statement, made all the stronger by the mega-scale perspective on the Earth that impels it. And thus, Cosmos continues to deliver on the greatest hopes of its fans and, apparently, its creators: To use a mass media platform to, at last, take on science rejectionism and set the deniers straight.

On our most popular episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Tyson explained why he doesn’t debate science deniers, and much more. You can listen here (interview starts around minute 13):

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of recent findings that laboratory mice respond differently to male researchers, and new breakthroughs in “therapeutic cloning,” or the creation of embryonic stem cell lines from cloned embryos.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds viaiTunesorRSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ on iTunes — you can learn more here.

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian, has had quite the run lately. A few weeks back, she was featured in the first episode of the Showtime series The Years of Living Dangerously, meeting with actor Don Cheadle in her home state of Texas to explain to him why faith and a warming planet aren’t in conflict. (You can watch that episode for free on YouTube; Hayhoe is a science adviser for the show.) Then, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2014; Cheadle wrote the entry. “There’s something fascinating about a smart person who defies stereotype,” Cheadle observed.

Why is Hayhoe in the spotlight? Simply put, millions of Americans are evangelical Christians, and their belief in the science of global warming is well below the national average. And if anyone has a chance of reaching this vast and important audience, Hayhoe does. “I feel like the conservative community, the evangelical community, and many other Christian communities, I feel like we have been lied to,” explains Hayhoe on the latest episode of theInquiring Minds podcast. “We have been given information about climate change that is not true. We have been told that it is incompatible with our values, whereas in fact it’s entirely compatible with conservative and with Christian values.”

Hayhoe’s approach to science — and to religion — was heavily influenced by her father, a former Toronto science educator and also, at one time, a missionary. “For him, there was never any conflict between the idea that there is a God, and the idea that science explains the world that we see around us,” says Hayhoe. When she was 9, her family moved to Colombia, where her parents worked as missionaries and educators, and where Hayhoe saw what environmental vulnerability really looks like. “Some of my friends lived in houses that were made out of cardboard Tide boxes, or corrugated metal,” she says. “And realizing that you don’t really need that much to be happy, but at the same time, you’re very vulnerable to the environment around you, the less that you have.”

Her research today, on the impacts of climate change, flows from those early experiences. And of course, it is inspired by her faith, which for Hayhoe, puts a strong emphasis on caring for the weakest and most vulnerable among us. “That gives us even more reason to care about climate change,” says Hayhoe, “because it is affecting people, and is disproportionately affecting the poor, and the vulnerable, and those who cannot care for themselves.”

The fact remains, though, that most evangelical Christians in the United States do not think as Hayhoe does. Recent data from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication suggests that while 64 percent of Americans think global warming is real and caused by human beings, only 44 percent of evangelicals do. Evangelicals in general, explains Hayhoe, tend to be more politically conservative, and can be quite distrusting of scientists (believing, incorrectly, that they’re all a bunch of atheists). Plus, some evangelicals really do go in for that whole “the world is ending” thing — not an outlook likely to inspire much care for the environment. So how does Hayhoe reach them?

From our interview, here are five of Hayhoe’s top arguments, for evangelical Christians, on climate change:

1. Conservation is conservative. The evangelical community isn’t just a religious community, it’s also a politically conservative one on average. So Hayhoe speaks directly to that value system. “What’s more conservative than conserving our natural resources, making sure we have enough for the future, and not wasting them like we are today?” she asks. “That’s a very conservative value.”

Indeed, many conservatives don’t buy into climate science because they don’t like the “Big Government” solutions they suspect the problem entails. But Hayhoe has an answer ready for that one too: Conservative-friendly, market-driven solutions to climate problems are actually all around us. “A couple of weeks ago, Texas … smashed the record for the most wind energy ever produced. It was 38 percent of our energy that week, came from wind,” she says. And Hayhoe thinks that’s just the beginning: “If you look at the map of where the greatest potential is for wind energy, it’s right up the red states. And I think that is going to make a big difference in the future.”

2. Yes, God would let this happen. One conservative Christian argument is that God just wouldn’t let human activities ruin the creation. Or, as Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) has put it, “God’s still up there, and the arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what he is doing in the climate, is to me, outrageous.” You can watch Inhofe and other religious right politicians dismissing climate change on biblical grounds in this video:

Hayhoe thinks the answer to Inhofe’s objection is simple: From a Christian perspective, we have free will to make decisions and must live with their consequences. This is, after all, a classic Christian solution to the theological problem of evil. “Are bad things happening? Yes, all the time,” says Hayhoe. “Someone gets drunk, they get behind the wheel of a car, they kill an innocent bystander, possibly even a child or a mother.”

Climate change is, to Hayhoe, just another wrong, another problem, brought on by flawed humans exercising their wills in a way that is less than fully advisable. “That’s really what climate change is,” she says. “It’s a casualty of the decisions that we have made.”

3. The Bible does not approve of letting the world burn. Hayhoe agrees with the common liberal perception that the evangelical community contains a significant proportion of apocalyptic or end-times believers – and that this belief, literally that judgment is upon us, undermines their concern about preserving the planet. But she thinks there’s something very wrong with that outlook, and indeed, that the Bible itself refutes it.

“The message that, we don’t care about anybody else, screw everybody, and let the world burn, that message is not a consistent message in the Bible,” says Hayhoe. In particular, she thinks the apostle Paul has a pretty good answer to end-times believers in his second epistle to the Thessalonians. Hayhoe breaks Paul’s message down like this: “I’ve heard that you’ve been quitting your jobs, you have been laying around and doing nothing, because you think that Christ is returning and the world is ending.” But Paul serves up a rebuke. In Hayhoe’s words: “Get a job, support yourself and your family, care for others — again, the poor and the vulnerable who can’t care for themselves — and do what you can, essentially, to make the world a better place, because nobody knows when that’s going to happen.”

4. Even if you believe in a young Earth, it’s still warming. One reason there’s such a tension between the evangelical community and science is, well, science. Many evangelicals are Young-Earth creationists, who believe that the Earth is 6,000 or so years old.

Hayhoe isn’t one of those. She studied astrophysics, and quasars that are quite ancient; and as she notes, believing the Earth and universe to be young creates a pretty problematic understanding of God: “Either you have to believe that God created everything looking as if it were billions of years old, or you have to believe it is billions of years old.” In the former case, God would, in effect, seem to be trying to trick us.

But when it comes to talking to evangelical audiences about climate change, Hayhoe doesn’t emphasize the age of the Earth, simply because, she says, there’s no need. “When I talk to Christian audiences, I only show ice core data and other proxy data going back 6,000 years,” says Hayhoe, “because I believe that you can make an even stronger case, for the massive way in which humans have interfered with the natural system, by only looking at a shorter period of time.”

“In terms of addressing the climate issue,” says Hayhoe, “we don’t have time for everybody to get on the same page regarding the age of the universe.”

5. “Caring for our environment is caring for people.” Finally, Hayhoe thinks it is crucial to emphasize to evangelicals that saving the planet is about saving people … not just saving animals. “I think there’s this perception,” says Hayhoe, “that if an environmentalist were driving down the road … and they saw a baby seal on one side and they saw a human on the other side, they would veer out of the way to avoid the baby seal and run down the human.” That’s why it’s so important, in her mind, to emphasize how climate change affects people (a logic once again affirming the perception that the polar bear was a terrible symbol for global warming). And there’s bountiful evidence of this: The just-released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “Working Group II” report on climate impacts emphasizes threats to our food supply, a risk of worsening violence in a warming world, and the potential displacement of vulnerable populations.

So is the message working? Hayhoe thinks so. After all, while only 44 percent of evangelicals may accept modern climate science today, she notes that that’s considerable progress from a2008 Pew poll, which had that number at just 34 percent. Ultimately, for Hayhoe, it comes down to this: “If you believe that God created the world, and basically gave it to humans as this incredible gift to live on, then why would you treat it like garbage? Treating the world like garbage says a lot about how you think about the person who you believe created the Earth.”

Filed under: Climate & Energy]]>http://grist.org/climate-energy/how-to-convince-conservative-christians-that-global-warming-is-real/feed/0lightning-god-earth.jpgKatharine Hayhoe.6,000 years of temperatures records and a projection of the warming to come. Climate DeskHow to use the Bible to save the planethttp://grist.org/climate-energy/how-to-use-the-bible-to-save-the-planet/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_chrismooney
http://grist.org/climate-energy/how-to-use-the-bible-to-save-the-planet/#commentsWed, 23 Apr 2014 16:55:35 +0000http://grist.org/?p=238424]]>Two views of what “dominion” means in the Book of Genesis: Noah’s (Russell Crowe), and that of Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone). Niko Tavernise/Paramount Pictures

For a brief moment in Darren Aronofsky’s hit religious epic film Noah, we see the Great Flood from space. From that vantage point, it looks much like an atmospheric event of the sort that a NASA satellite might photograph, so we can all share it on Facebook. So what does biblical cataclysm look like from orbit? Beautifully, and yet terrifyingly, the entire Earth appears to be draped in a quilt of hurricanes, each cyclone nestled alongside the next.

“There is a huge statement in the film, a strong message about the coming flood from global warming,” Aronofsky told The New Yorker in an extensive profile. The film also contains a depiction of the Big Bang (something doubted by 51 percent of Americans, according to a recent survey), fins-to-limbs evolution, and the very clear implication that the biblical “days” of the creation were only metaphorical days, not literal, 24-hour ones.

In other words, you might say Noah is waving the red cape in front of fundamentalist Christianity. No wonder, as Mother Jones‘ Asawin Suebsaeng puts it, the film has inspired a “flood of religious freak-outs.”

But the freak-outs shouldn’t get all the attention: No matter what the Christian right may say, Noah is a deeply religious and spiritual film containing an authentic moral message. And that message feeds strongly into a vital and growing religious tradition of our time, one that especially appeals to younger believers: faith-based environmentalism, or what is sometimes called “creation care,” which uses biblically based moral imperatives to impel conservation and stewardship. (Aronofsky and his Noah cowriter Ari Handel attended an event at the Center for American Progress to discuss just this aspect of the film. You can watch a replay of the conversation here.)

As for the film itself: Aronofsky and Handel relied heavily on not just the text of the Bible (where the story of Noah encompasses roughly four chapters of the book of Genesis), but also Jewish Midrash, ancient explications of religious texts. The result is creative, sometimes idiosyncratic, heavily influenced by Jewish theology, and above all, deeply environmental. In other words, it’s a film that may tick off people who are very rigid in their biblical literalism, but for other believers, it’s an environmental epic that can be resonant indeed.

Whose “dominion?”

Aronofsky has called Noah the “first environmentalist.” The film goes further: It actively interprets the Bible in favor of those who argue that the book of Genesis requires us all to be good “stewards” of the creation — and in strong opposition to those who read its language about humankind having “dominion … over all the Earth, and over every creeping thing” as mainly implying that all this exists for us. (Who holds such a view? Well, here’s Rick Santorum: “Man is here to use the resources, and use them wisely, to care for the Earth, to be a steward the Earth, but we’re not here to serve the Earth, the Earth is not the objective. Man is the objective.”)

Noah tells us, bluntly, that that’s what the bad guys think. Those bad guys in the film are led by a figure named Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone), who very early on declares, “Damned if I don’t take what I want.” Tubal-Cain represents the line of Cain (Adam’s son, who killed his brother Abel) and thus embodies the biblical “wickedness” of humankind just before the Flood; in the film, that wickedness is embodied, in Tolkienlike fashion, as industrialization, environmental despoilment, and pollution. And most of all, the killing and eating of animals: We see Tubal-Cain and his followers do this repeatedly throughout the film.

In the film, Tubal-Cain’s interpretation of dominion is “more of a conquest, take whatever you need for your own pleasure,” explains David Jenkins, an evangelical Christian and the president of Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship, a group that believes that “the true conservative will be a good steward of the natural systems and resources that sustain life on Earth.”

“And that sometimes is the way that people seem to have interpreted the word ‘dominion,’ when actually, if you go back to the Hebrew language, and you understand that in its true context, dominion is basically ‘authority,'” continues Jenkins. “And with any kind of authority … it comes with great responsibility and a sense of stewardship and caring.”

Noah, by contrast, represents the line of Seth (another of Adam’s sons), and their clan’s approach to the environment is vastly different. The key word, as Noah’s father, Lamech, puts it, is “responsibility.” Noah passes that message on to his son Ham: “All of these innocent creatures are in our care,” he tells the boy after Ham wrongly picks a flower. “It’s our job to look after them.”

Animals herd onto the Ark in Noah.Niko Tavernise/Paramount

Later in the film, in a rather disturbing psychological plot twist, Russell Crowe’s Noah becomes so appalled at the evils of men (after watching a hungry mob tear apart an animal and devour it) that he wrongly interprets God’s will to be that humankind should go extinct, leaving only the “innocent” animals on Earth. This leads to plenty of drama, including Noah briefly threatening to kill his own granddaughters because they might some day bear children and lead to a continuance of humanity. But he isn’t actually up to it, and neither is the film. Noah isn’t anti-human; it’s just very strongly in favor of the idea that humans have serious environmental responsibilities, and that the Bible itself tells them so.

The film thus represents pretty strong reinforcement for a social movement that has gathered increasing momentum in the past half decade or more: the “creation care” movement. For just as the film Noah does, followers of this movement interpret the Bible’s language about “dominion” not to mean domination or simple mastery, but rather, to imply responsibility and the need for environmental stewardship.

One reason this movement has drawn such attention is that in addition to its obvious mainline religious appeal, it seems able to inspire at least some evangelical Christians to go against our expectations about the Christian right, and support solutions to global warming. “I think that’s part of the interest — it’s not part of the evangelical stereotype,” says Katharine Wilkinson, author of the book Between God and Green: How Evangelicals Are Cultivating a Middle Ground on Climate Change.

Granted, the majority of that demographic group remains in denial about climate change. According to a 2013 study of evangelicals’ climate views published in the journal Global Environmental Change, evangelicals were less likely than average Americans to think global warming is happening, to believe that it is caused by humans, and to believe that most scientists think it is happening. Consider: 64 percent of nonevangelicals, but only 44 percent of evangelicals, agree that climate change is “caused mostly by human activities.”

Evangelicals are diverse, however: Those who are female, more egalitarian, and overall less conservative in their values are much more likely to believe climate change is real and to want to do something about it, the study found. And as Wilkinson emphasizes, young evangelicals are particularly likely to accept climate change. “You see kind of a gap between evangelicals and the average American, in terms of their belief [in global warming],” she says, “but you see that gap basically disappear with evangelicals under 30. They don’t look any different from other young Americans.”

Overall, then, you might say that a large and growing minority of evangelicals seem very open to messages about why it is their biblical responsibility to take care of the creation, and also willing to apply this view to the climate issue specifically. “I see more and more evangelicals engaged when we talk about creation care,” says the Rev. Mitchell Hescox, president of the Evangelical Environmental Network. “We’ve gone from 15,000 email people to a quarter of a million people who regularly read our messages.”

The Ark finally finds land. Niko Tavernise/Paramount

So how will the film speak to this audience? Hescox is skeptical, worrying that “the message of caring for God’s creation got lost in the discussion over the literary license that was taken in creating and producing the story for the film.”

David Jenkins of Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship feels differently, however, arguing that the film is “perfectly consistent with the biblical account.”

“That’s the great thing about a movie as a vehicle, for that two hours, you’ve got them sitting there and that’s what they’re engrossed in, no outside influences come in and influence anything,” says Jenkins. “So I think it’s reasonable to assume that if something is well done and it’s consistent with Scripture, it will have an impact.”

And once again, that will probably be most true of the young evangelicals, a large number of whom will surely see the film. “Young people especially, I think, young people don’t have the same commitment to dogma, or biblical literalism that their parents and elders have,” says the Reverend Michael Dowd, a climate change activist. “They’re living in a milieu, living in a culture where it’s not cool to trash the planet, and it’s beginning to become shameful to hold a ‘the end of the world is right around the corner’ worldview, so therefore, we can do whatever we want to the planet.”

The film is already a major success in Hollywood terms. With a budget of $125 million, it has so far brought in over $300 million worldwide, and has been out for less than a month. In other words, Noah is a big enough cultural event that it could substantially move the needle of public opinion, much like another environmental-catastrophe blockbuster, 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow, was later shown to have done. In one study, 83 percent of people who had viewed that film were “somewhat” or “very concerned” about global warming, as opposed to 72 percent of Americans who hadn’t seen it. (The study controlled for a variety of factors, including political ideology.)

At one point in Aronofsky’s film, Noah tells his family, “We have been entrusted with a task much greater than our own desires.” Whatever your faith and, indeed, whether or not you’re religious, a serious look at science and the state of the planet makes that statement inarguable. If Noah helps to further advance that message, then just like the movie’s namesake, it may also help to save us.

Filed under: Climate & Energy, Living]]>http://grist.org/climate-energy/how-to-use-the-bible-to-save-the-planet/feed/0NOAHTwo views of what "dominion" means in the Book of Genesis: Noah's (Russell Crowe), and that of Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone). Darren Aronofsky on the set of Noah.Animals herd onto the Ark in Noah.The Ark finally finds land. Climate DeskIf you were watching “Game of Thrones,” you missed Neil Tyson’s solution to global warminghttp://grist.org/climate-energy/if-you-were-watching-game-of-thrones-last-night-you-missed-neil-tysons-solution-to-global-warming/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_chrismooney
http://grist.org/climate-energy/if-you-were-watching-game-of-thrones-last-night-you-missed-neil-tysons-solution-to-global-warming/#commentsMon, 14 Apr 2014 20:21:49 +0000http://grist.org/?p=237233]]>

Last night’s episode of Fox’s Cosmos series didn’t seem political or controversial, at least on the surface. Rather, it introduced us to the world on the molecular and atomic scale, at one point venturing inside of a dewdrop (packed with extremely cool tiny organisms like tardigrades) and, later, inside of a plant cell. It was kind of reminiscent of what you learned in your ninth grade bio class — albeit much less sleep inducing.

Yet fresh from ticking off creationists, this time around host Neil deGrasse Tyson managed to work in the science of climate change.

Plants, after all, are the reigning global masters of clean energy. They use 100-percent solar power: The chloroplast, the so-called “powerhouse” of a plant cell, is a “3-billion-year-old solar energy collector” and a “submicroscopic solar battery,” as Tyson put it. Basically, chloroplasts use sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water to store energy in sugars, and give off oxygen as a byproduct. And without this fundamental green energy technology, life on this planet as we know it wouldn’t exist.

Cosmos tours the happenings inside a dewdrop, and within the cells of plants. Fox

That’s where Tyson brought up climate change. Here’s how he put it:

But if we could figure out the trade secrets of photosynthesis? Every other source of energy we depend on today — coal, oil, natural gas — would become obsolete. Photosynthesis is the ultimate green power. It doesn’t pollute the air, and is in fact carbon neutral. Artificial photosynthesis, on a big enough scale, could reduce the greenhouse effect that’s driving climate change in a dangerous direction.

Tyson isn’t kidding: The Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, sponsored by the University of California and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is busy at work trying to build “molecular-level energy conversion ‘machines’ that generate fuels directly from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide.” Just the simple stuff.

This is at least the second time that Cosmos has brought up the climate issue. It’s enough to make you wonder: Is that where this series is heading? After all, to follow faithfully in the footsteps of Carl Sagan, it isn’t enough to instill in us a sense of wonder about the nature of the cosmos, and the fact that our minds can actually understand it. You have to go further: This cosmic knowledge then feeds back into a terrestrial mission, which is to protect the Earth, the only home we’ve ever known and the launching pad for all intellectual and scientific adventures.

For Sagan in the 1980s, that meant staving off nuclear war; for us today, it means staving off rising temperatures. So will Cosmos and Tyson go beyond hinting, and say even more about climate change? Stay tuned.

On our most popular episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Neil Tyson explained why he doesn’t debate science deniers, and much more. You can listen here (interview starts around minute 13):

According to a Pew study released last year, 38 percent of U.S. adults watch cable news. So if you want to know why so many Americans deny or doubt the established science of climate change, the content they’re receiving on cable news may well point the way.

According to a new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists, misinformation about climate science on cable news channels is pretty common. The study found that last year, 30 percent of CNN’s climate-related segments were misleading, compared with 72 percent for Fox News and just 8 percent for MSNBC. The study methodology was quite strict: Segments that contained “any inaccurate or misleading representations of climate science” were classified as misleading.

By far the worst performer was Fox (this is hardly the first study to associate this channel with sowing reams of doubt about climate change). Notably, the UCS report found that “more than half” of the channel’s misleading content was due to The Five, a program where the hosts regularly argue against climate science. For instance, Greg Gutfeld, one of the show’s regular co-hosts, charged on Sept. 30 that “experts pondered hiding the news that the Earth hadn’t … warmed in 15 years, despite an increase in emissions. They concluded that the missing heat was trapped in the ocean. It’s like blaming gas on the dog if the ocean was your dog.” (To understand what is actually going on with the alleged global warming “pause,” and why the deep oceans may well explain part of the story, click here.)

You can watch Gutfeld’s comments here:

As Gutfeld’s statement suggests, one of the standard Fox practices was sowing doubt about scientists themselves. On Feb. 13, 2013, for instance, Sean Hannity commented, “I don’t believe that this global warming nonsense is real,” and then went on to mention “phony emails” from climate scientists. (If you want to know what was actually up with those emails, read here.)

Fox’s two most accurate programs with respect to climate science were The O’Reilly Factor and Special Report with Bret Baier. As the UCS study put it, “O’Reilly and Baier’s programs, although also airing a number of segments containing inaccurate statements about climate science, were responsible for nearly all of the network’s accurate coverage.”

In contrast to Fox, the study found that MSNBC was overwhelmingly accurate in its coverage, and also devoted a great deal of attention to climate change. That was particularly the case for programs hosted by Chris Hayes, whose All In With Chris Hayes featured 30 segments about climate change. When MSNBC did err, the study found, it was because hosts or guests “overstated the effects of climate change, particularly the link between climate change and specific types of extreme weather, such as tornadoes.”

CNN provides the most interesting case in the analysis. In general, the network was usually accurate; when it erred, however, it tended to be because climate-denying guests had appeared in “debates” the network hosted over the reality of climate change. Take a Jan. 23 debate on Out Front with Erin Burnett, for instance, in which Erick Erickson of RedState (then a CNN contributor) claimed that “the 1950s had more extreme weather than now.”

Overall, the UCS report calculated that if CNN had not hosted misleading science debates, it would have improved its accuracy rating to 86 percent. “The biggest step that CNN could take to increase the accuracy of the information it provides to its viewers,” the study concluded, “is to stop hosting debates about established climate science and instead host debates and discussions about whether and how to respond to climate change through climate policy.”

Filed under: Climate & Energy, Politics]]>http://grist.org/climate-energy/only-28-percent-of-fox-news-climate-segments-are-accurate/feed/0fox-news-protest.jpgIn 2013, 14 Fox News segments referencing climate science were entirely accurate whil 36 continated misleading statements. In 2013, 121 MSNBC segments referencing climate sciene were entirely accurate while 11 contianed misleading statements.Climate DeskIs this man the greenest governor in America?http://grist.org/climate-energy/is-this-man-the-greenest-governor-in-america/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_chrismooney
http://grist.org/climate-energy/is-this-man-the-greenest-governor-in-america/#commentsTue, 01 Apr 2014 16:30:40 +0000http://grist.org/?p=235379]]>When Jay Inslee was elected governor of the state of Washington in November of 2012, climate campaigners rejoiced. As a congressman, Inslee had a top-tier environmental record, and not just that: He knew climate and clean energy issues inside-out. The coauthor of the 2007 book entitled Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy, he also worked closely on the 2009 passage of cap-and-trade legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives and was a cofounder of the House’s Sustainable Energy Caucus. No wonder that upon his election in Washington, the League of Conservation Voters declared that Inslee was poised to become “the greenest governor in the country.”

Sure enough, Inslee’s term got off to a great start: Last October, he joined the governors of Oregon and California and the premier of British Columbia in endorsing the Pacific Coast Action Plan on Climate and Energy which pledges that those states (or, in B.C.’s case, that province) will set a consistent price or cap on carbon dioxide emissions (something California and British Columbia have already done), adopt low-carbon fuel standards, and more.

But there’s just one problem: Shortly after Inslee’s election, two Democrats elected to caucus with the Republican minority in the Washington state Senate, thus thwarting what otherwise would have been a Democratic majority in both houses. Instead of holding a 26-23 majority in the Senate, Democrats instead became a de facto 25-24 minority. And that razor-thin edge in the Washington state Senate is currently blocking Inslee from achieving many of his objectives.

The partisan tension became apparent with Washington state’s Climate Legislative and Executive Workgroup, or CLEW, a bipartisan panel composed of two Republican and two Democratic legislators, along with Inslee as a non-voting member. Their task was to recommend a set of policies that would let Washington state adhere to greenhouse gas emissions goals that had been enacted in 2008: a reduction to 1990 emissions levels by 2020, then 25 percent below those levels by 2035, and finally, 50 percent below by 2050.

The workgroup convened sessions and public deliberations around the state — but reached no bipartisan consensus. “We had over 900 citizens come out speaking overwhelmingly in favor of climate action, and close to 10,000 comments,” says Becky Kelley, deputy director of the Washington Environmental Council. “So, evidence that people really are calling for action.” Yet the Democrats and Republicans on the working group could not find common ground. They issued two separate reports, with the Democrats and Inslee endorsing strong climate action and the Republicans suggesting a variety of options, but not a central policy to cap greenhouse gas emissions, citing a “currently insufficient analysis of costs.”

There has been more friction on the issue of a proposed low carbon fuel standard. In a January 2014 letter, Inslee charged Republican state Sen. Curtis King, who co-chairs the Transportation Committee, with having misrepresented the governor’s policy goals by incorrectly labeling the standard a “tax.” In fact, the idea is to require a gradual reduction in the carbon content of fuels through a variety of means, ranging from blending in biofuels to encouraging more electric vehicles. “There is no element of a clean fuels standard that could in any way be called a ‘tax,'” wrote Inslee, later adding that a standard “would include cost containment measures to ensure that fuel prices are not significantly affected.” King responded by asking Inslee to “categorically deny” any intention to impose a fuel standard by executive action, in effect bypassing the legislature. King later charged that Inslee “refuses” to take this option off the table.

And even as Inslee faces Republican resistance at home, his climate action partners may be growing a little impatient. British Columbians, for instance, have already put a price on carbon through a carbon tax, and are waiting for their southern ally to catch up to them. In the meantime, there are frequent charges that drivers who go across the border into Washington to gas up are partially undermining the tax’s effectiveness, and at least some evidence that this is happening, at least to a modest extent.

All of which underscores that if Washington acts strongly on climate, the impact will extend far beyond Washington. For the state will be strengthening and reinforcing what California and British Columbia have already done, and the more these Pacific coast states are unified, the more the United States and even the world will have to take notice. “The sense is that if the west coast as a bloc acts, if we’ve got real climate policy from B.C. to Baja, that’s the world’s fifth largest economy,” says Kelly of the Washington Environmental Council.

In the meantime, though, Inslee’s position within his state is much like that of President Barack Obama nationally, observes David Roberts of Grist. “He wants to act, but he’s got no Republicans in the legislature on his side,” says Roberts, “so if he gets anything done, it’s going to be through executive powers.”

So what happens next? Eric de Place, policy director of the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based environmental think tank, thinks that if gridlock persists beyond 2014, there’s a chance that a citizen-led ballot initiative in Washington state could allow the public to vote directly on how to curb carbon emissions. Before, that, though, he thinks that Inslee may ultimately try to opt for a policy, like a carbon tax, that might be made palatable to state Republicans: The tax could be designed so that the revenue that it brings in would go towards other state budget shortfalls, such as in the transportation sector and in education.

In his inaugural address as governor, Inslee declared that on leading the nation in green policy, “It is clear to me that we are the right state, at the right time, with the right people.” But now, that delicate balance may have shifted. “I’m certain the governor feels that not enough is getting done on climate action,” says Eric de Place of the Sightline Institute. The question is what Inslee plans to do about it.

Suppose that you live in Vancouver and you drive a car to work. Naturally, you have to get gas regularly. When you stop at the pump, you may see a notice like the one above, explaining that part of the price you’re paying is, in effect, due to the cost of carbon. That’s because in 2008, the government of British Columbia decided to impose a tax on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, enacting what has been called “the most significant carbon tax in the Western Hemisphere by far.”

If the goal was to reduce global warming pollution, then the B.C. carbon tax totally works. Since its passage, gasoline use in British Columbia has plummeted, declining seven times as much as might be expected from an equivalent rise in the market price of gas, according to a recent study by two researchers at the University of Ottawa. That’s apparently because the tax hasn’t just had an economic effect: It has also helped change the culture of energy use in B.C. “I think it really increased the awareness about climate change and the need for carbon reduction, just because it was a daily, weekly thing that you saw,” says Merran Smith, the head of Clean Energy Canada. “It made climate action real to people.”

It also saved many of them a lot of money. Sure, the tax may cost you if you drive your car a great deal, or if you have high home gas heating costs. But it also gives you the opportunity to save a lot of money if you change your habits, for instance by driving less or buying a more fuel-efficient vehicle. That’s because the tax is designed to be “revenue neutral” — the money it raises goes right back to citizens in the form of tax breaks. Overall, the tax has brought in some $5 billion in revenue so far, and more than $3 billion has then been returned in the form of business tax cuts, along with over $1 billion in personal tax breaks, and nearly $1 billion in low-income tax credits (to protect those for whom rising fuel costs could mean the greatest economic hardship). According to the B.C. Ministry of Finance, for individuals who earn up to $122,000, income tax rates in the province are now Canada’s lowest.

So what’s the downside? Well, there really isn’t one for most British Columbians, unless they drive their gas-guzzling cars a lot. (But then, the whole point of taxing carbon is to use market forces to discourage such behavior.) The far bigger downside is for Canadians in other provinces who lack such a sensible policy — and especially for Americans. In the United States, the idea of doing anything about global warming is currently anathema, even though addressing the problem in the way that British Columbia has done would help the environment and could also put money back in many people’s pockets. Such is the depth of our dysfunction; but by looking closely at British Columbia, at least we can see that it doesn’t have to be that way.

British Columbia’s carbon tax was, by all accounts, a surprise at the outset. B.C.’s center-right Liberal Party, which introduced the policy, wasn’t exactly known at the time for its strong environmental track record. However, then-Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell was apparently much influenced by the business-friendly environmentalism of California’s then-governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Liberals were also very friendly with economists, 70 of whom came out in 2007 with a letter calling for a “revenue-neutral carbon tax.” (For a very helpful in-depth history of the B.C. tax, see here.)

Environmentalists and the business community also chimed in with support, and sure enough, in February 2008, B.C. Finance Minister Carole Taylor formally introduced the tax. It would be set at an initial low rate of $10 per metric ton of CO2 equivalent emissions, and scheduled to increase $5 per year until it reached $30 per metric ton (which it did on July 1, 2012). The revenue would go straight back to taxpayers, and all B.C. residents would get a one-time payment of $100 — dubbed a “Climate Action Dividend” — when the policy first launched. There is also a “Climate Action Tax Credit” from the carbon tax, paid to low income persons or families, who currently receive $115.50 for each parent and $34.50 per child annually.

Legislative passage was more or less assured, because the Liberals controlled the provincial government. But shortly after it kicked in, opposition ramped up. After all, the tax took effect in July 2008, just prior to the worst part of the economic collapse. The recession greatly dampened support for climate action, strengthening political claims that reining in emissions would further damage an already deeply wounded economy. Rather surprisingly, B.C.’s left-of-center New Democratic Party, known for championing environmental causes, seized the moment to campaign against the tax, calling instead for a cap-and-trade policy and using the slogan “Axe the Tax.” Premier Campbell, though, stood strongly in favor of his party’s creation, reportedly insisting, according to the Vancouver Sun, that “if they wanted to get rid of the tax they would have to get rid of him.”

Thus, the carbon tax survived an initial trial by fire, and the opposition softened. After all, after a few years with the tax in place (and the resulting tax cuts for B.C. residents getting larger and larger), any repeal of the policy would amount to a highly unpopular tax increase. “The party that I represent opposed the legislation at the beginning, and we’ve changed our point of view now to embrace it,” says Spencer Chandra Herbert, a British Columbia legislator from the New Democratic Party who is the official opposition voice on environmental issues. “And we’re actually raising questions about what’s next.”

The tax has actually become quite popular. “Polls have shown anywhere from 55 to 65 percent support for the tax,” says Stewart Elgie, director of the University of Ottawa’s Institute of the Environment. “And it would be hard to find any tax that the majority of people say they like, but the majority of people say they like this tax.”

It certainly doesn’t hurt that the tax, well, worked. That’s clear on at least three fronts: Major reductions in fuel usage in B.C., a corresponding decline in greenhouse gas emissions, and the lack of a negative impact on the B.C. economy.

Quantifying the effects of B.C.’s carbon tax is somewhat complicated by its timing: The 2008-09 economic collapse reduced overall emissions across Canada, and indeed, across the world. Moreover, British Columbia is somewhat of a unique place in that the No. 1 source of electricity is actually carbon-free hydroelectric power, not coal or natural gas.

Therefore, the most likely place for the carbon tax to make an impact would be in sales of carbon-intensive fuels like gasoline and diesel. Sure enough, a recent analysis by Seattle’s Sightline Institute shows that B.C.’s sales of motor fuels and other petroleum products declined by 15 percent in just the first four years of the carbon tax, much more than in the country as a whole:

Yet another analysis, by the research and policy group Sustainable Prosperity, finds a similar result: A 17 percent per capita decline in fuel consumption in B.C.

Then there are greenhouse gas emissions. Again, comparing B.C. to the rest of Canada is a little tricky. Elsewhere in the country, the recent shift from coal-fired power plants to natural gas has lowered emissions, but that change has not been felt as much in B.C. because of its heavy use of hydropower. However, if you centrally look at either emissions from fuel or the sale of fuels subject to the tax (gasoline, diesel, and so on), the Sustainable Prosperity and the Sightline Institute reports broadly agree that there has been a considerable decline relative to the rest of Canada.

What’s more, this happened even as B.C.’s economy fared just as well as Canada’s economy in general. “B.C.’s fuel use has gone down dramatically, and its economy has kept pace with the rest of Canada at the same time,” says the University of Ottawa’s Stewart Elgie, a coauthor of the Sustainable Prosperity report.

Overall, then, that’s not a bad record for a tax that is just five years old. “What it has done is reduced our carbon emissions, reduced our fuel consumption, and in that period our GDP and our population has gone up,” says Clean Energy Canada’s Smith. “So it’s quite impressive what it has done.”

Not everyone would agree, of course; on the national level, Canada’s ruling Conservative Party is strongly opposed to a carbon tax. In 2008 (when a national version of the tax was under consideration), the party argued that it would “plunge Canada into a recession.”

“Politically, our federal government has tried to make carbon taxation toxic, saying it’s a job killer,” adds the New Democratic Party’s Spencer Chandra Herbert. “B.C.’s experience has proven that it doesn’t have to be, and I would argue, it can lead to more jobs.”

Canadians aren’t the only ones who could benefit from emulating B.C.’s policies — so would Americans. Scholarly research suggests that a national carbon tax in the United States could be at least as effective as the B.C. tax, both in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and in lowering income taxes (or, lowering the deficit).

Take, for instance, a recent study from Resources for the Future, a prominent environmental policy think tank, that modeled the economic impact of different carbon taxes. The study found that a very modest $30 per ton carbon tax (roughly equivalent to B.C.’s tax, but in U.S. dollars) would yield about $226 billion in annual revenues. If paid directly back to every American, that would equal a rebate of $876 per year; but of course, this vast sum of money could be used for a variety of purposes, including to greatly reduce the federal deficit.

Meanwhile, the Resources for the Future study found that emissions reductions in the U.S. by the year 2025 would be on the order of 15 percent, and the economic costs would be small: Effects on GDP range from mildly positive to mildly negative depending upon the particular scenario used.

The bottom line, then, is that B.C.’s experience provides an exclamation point at the end of the long list of reasons to like a carbon tax. Perhaps the leading one, in the end, is that it’s a far simpler policy option than a cap and trade scheme, and is, as Harvard economist and Bush administration Council of Economic Advisers chair N. Gregory Mankiw has put it, “more effective and less invasive” than the sort of regulatory approaches that the government tends to implement.

Indeed, economists tend to adore carbon taxes. When the IGM forum asked a group of 51 prominent economists whether a carbon tax would be “a less expensive way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions than would be a collection of policies such as ‘corporate average fuel economy’ requirements for automobiles,” assent was extremely high: 90 percent either agreed or strongly agreed. Yale economist Christopher Udry commented, “This is as clear as economics gets; provides incentives to find minimally costly ways to reduce emissions.”

“Totally basic economics!” added Stanford’s Robert Hall.

Since 2012, British Columbia has not raised the carbon tax further. Instead, the government agreed to freeze the rate as it is for five years. And no wonder: B.C. is now far ahead of most of its neighbors, and most of North America, in taking action to curtail global warming. Many policy watchers think the B.C. carbon tax still needs more strengthening, however, to ultimately set in place the kinds of emissions cuts needed. Smith would like revenue from further increases to be used to advance further carbon reductions, rather than for more tax breaks.

In the meantime, another question is whether any other provinces or U.S. states, seeing B.C.’s success, will wade into these waters. For instance, as part of the Pacific Coast Action Plan on Climate and Energy, Washington state and Oregon have both pledged to join B.C. and California in putting a price on carbon emissions. (California already has a cap-and-trade program.) The question is whether these states will decide that the far simpler (and more economically supported) carbon tax is the way to go.

In the meantime, B.C. can boast of the crown jewel of North American climate policy. “B.C. now has the lowest fuel use in Canada, the lowest tax rates in Canada, and a pretty healthy economy,” says the University of Ottawa’s Stewart Elgie. “It works.”